Yeah I always just took em for granted but the fact that they’ve more or less survived neo-liberalization is incredible. I’d really love to live in a town with a tool library at some point, even tho I’m getting my own tools anyways for work. It’d just be real neat to live in a place that made that sort of thing available.
A small far out libertarian party on my country one complained about how libraries were decreasing the labour supply. Basically the argument was that since the unemployed could go there and be online for free they would sit there all day instead of looking for work. And since they could have free books at the library they would not be as motivated to get a job in order to be able to pay for books.
They are.
For many years they handed out free Ayn Rand books. When the previous right-wing government slashed benefits ushering in a kind of desperate poverty we hadn’t had here for decades they celebrated with champagne.
One of their MP’s once had a blog where he once famously claimed that women have no honour, their chairman has a sentence for football hooliganism and has posted picture of himself from a shooting range captioned “ready to battle the reds”. Their third MP used to be some sort of demsoc but has now gravitated to being angry about “left wing fascism” and claiming that radical Islamists and feminists are going to make “normal biological women” oppressed.
That’s horrifying, inhumane, and completely consistent with neoliberalism.
