[WEB4LIB] RE: More Library News From the State of Washington

[Kevil, L H.]

Hi Bill,

I see that my request for abstinence from political partisanship in a technical forum did not meet with much success. So let me respond in a friendly manner to your message briefly from my own personal (i.e., biased) point of view.

You are a public librarian. Well and good. Does that mean that you must adopt one philosophy over others? Shouldn't we think based on our lights rather than our meal ticket? If so, our personal affiliation is irrelevant.

I confess that I have no idea who is advocating what in Washington. But I have observed that many heterodox ideas get very short shrift from those of us who rush to judgement too quickly. (Mea culpa.) To take a different example, I believe that we as a society would be far better off if we scrapped the present income tax system and replaced it with a flat consumption or national sales tax with no deductions. Could you conclude from that that I am an enemy of homeownership, since we would lose our mortgage deduction, or an enemy of the blind, who would lose a deduction, &c? Only if you are too impatient to examine the entire argument or are partisan or emotional to begin with. The point is simply that overall we would be more better off with a new system than with the present one. And I would be the first to say that transition to a new system would be a long, hard difficult process, particularly if we wanted to work it out in a fair and reasonable manner. (The first principle along this path is that tax systems should be limited by law to the raising of money, period. Social welfare policies should be implemented OUTSIDE of the tax system as separate programs that should be visible and stand or fall on their own.) 

So I would suggest that if you take the people in Washington seriously, you should find out if they believe there are any public goods within public libraries. If not, they are probably crackpots and do not deserve our attention. If they do - as is probable -, I would suggest you investigate how they would advocate going about preserving them. This is harder than simply to flame people whose thinking does not mirror our own. (Again, mea culpa.) But it is more enlightening - and enlightened. I suspect that I believe there are fewer true public goods in public libraries than you do (and I used to work for one); but I would certainly hope that we could have a pleasant, civilized discussion of the real issues nonetheless. Outside a technical forum, of course.

Hunter

-----Original Message-----
From: William M. Wines [mailto:wwines at tln.lib.mi.us]
Sent: Wednesday, August 21, 2002 1:19 PM
To: Kevil, L H.
Cc: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Re: [WEB4LIB] RE: More Library News From the State of
Washington


On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Kevil, L H. wrote:

> Hey, do you think we could keep the political potshots out of this discussion list? So far the participants have taken only one side of a fundamental issue, on both sides of which there are good people and good arguments. Do we want to see a technical forum degenerate into a flame war?

As a public librarian, I don't think that there IS more than one side to
the issue when you have people seriously talking about eliminating public
libraries.  Or am I failing to appreciate the nuances?

------------------------------
Bill Wines
Assistant Director
Walled Lake City Library
1499 E. West Maple Rd.
Walled Lake, MI 48390
(248) 624-3772
http://walled-lake.lib.mi.us
-----------------------------
"There may be nicer, smarter and better people than librarians
 somewhere, but I don't know who they could be." --
		Denis Horgan, _Hartford Courant_, July 17, 2002