E-mail: ericzorn@aol.com
ast year at the height of one of the periodic conservative political spasms against public broadcasting I wrote what I considered to be a drippingly satirical, profoundly Swiftian column calling for the immediate halt to all funding for public libraries: I hope you will permit me to read just a bit from that to give you the flavor:
This nation is drowning in debt, and our aesthetes, intellectuals and other pleasure-seekers are regularly enjoying diversions paid for by ordinary citizens like you and me.AND SO ON....No more halfway measures. Let's put a stop to freebies for escapists and cheapskate dilettantes who use big words and impress one another by quoting French guys. Let's end government "enrichments" of our nation's "cultural life" that are already commercially available elsewhere.
The law now forces citizens to buy novels they may never read, reference books they may never consult and volumes of poetry that may bore and alienate them.
Some, even much, of the fiction in public libraries contains sexual language and situations. The non-fiction shelves and periodical racks are littered with all sorts of ideological and sociological claptrap as well as barely relevant information on such matters as the history of foreign porcelain. The circulating videos, CDs and books on tape promote all the good and bad in popular culture.
Is it really the role of government to provide complimentary reading, viewing and listening matter to the freeloaders of the world?
If "egghead loves his booky-wook," as Homer Simpson once taunted Bart, he now has more places than ever-including the new, huge Borders, Barnes & Noble and Waterstone's stores-to find or order it. Hard-working people...need no longer pick up the tab.
If enough members of the public are interested in a particular book, magazine or other information product, then a merchant will offer it. If the demand is slack, well, where in our Constitution does it say everyone is entitled to a free look at "Indiana: From Industrial Frontier to Industrial Commonwealth," "Photoprocessors, Photoreceptors and Evolution" or, gad, "Murder of Innocence"?
Yank libraries from the public teat. Let users pay the freight. Charge browsers by the hour and readers by the book. This will level the playing field for commercial purveyors and help trim the state and local budgets from which comes most of the approximately $4 billion a year spent in this country on public libraries.
I can already imagine the objections to my modest proposal from those who would cloak themselves in concern for children, education, knowledge and literacy. But I am not against these things. I acknowledge that libraries are the source of much material valued by people of all ages, and that some of it is not easily available.
I'm just getting with the program, joining the Republican ax-swingers as they rail against art and broadcast funding on the grounds that government should stick to necessary services and get out of the culture and entertainment business.
Why stop with arts and broadcasting? This vision can lead well beyond libraries to local and national parks among other government-provided frills.
Why should I have to pay taxes to support lifeguards at city beaches and pools that I've used about twice in the last decade? Newt Gingrich analogously dismisses the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a "sandbox for rich, upper-class people," but what about the real sandboxes? Why should those of you without children have to ante up for playground equipment? And why should any but the vacationers and adventurers who actually go there pay for the maintenance and upkeep of Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon and other national parks?
Well, you wouldn't believe how many people called and wrote after that to say, "Right on!" "Privatization!" "Self-regulating free market!" "Get government off our backs." "Eliminate the immoral library tax now!"
This is what it's come to on one side of the public debate; to a single-minded belief that government just messes things up, just gets in the way, just befouls initiative and cripples progress.
Adherents would carry such a belief beyond the easy targets -- welfare, poetry subsidies and so on -- to attack public libraries. Libraries! I can think of almost no better or simpler example of a government program that works than the public library system, no better exhibition of how collective investment in a community resource improves the overall life of that community than a public library.
Libraries make us smarter, they make us wiser, they make us more sensitive, more aware, more filled with wonder and hungrier than before. They broaden us and focus us; challenge us and entertain us. They are a groaning banquet table for the mind.
I give very few speeches. I'm a writer who sits alone at a desk most days and I don't consider myself a public speaker. By the end of this tonight you may find yourself with a keen understanding why.
But I accepted this invitation eagerly because of my great respect for the information professionals who keep public and private library systems running and my appreciation for those who, with their organizational and technical talents, keep the vast and multi-media array of materials in order and accessible so that we civilians can use it.
The public library system is a government program that works. To maintain libraries we each contribute a little and, somehow, in return, get more than a lot.
Libraries don't contribute directly to our national defense. They do not fight crime and they do not house felons ... knowingly. And even though they're not federally funded for the most part, public libraries nevertheless serve as an illustration of a broader point I'm going to explore tonight which is that government can and should have a broad function in society. That "government" and "regulation" and such accompanying concepts as "taxation" and "limits on capitalism" are not necessarily, by any means, the manifest evil that leading conservative politicians and media blowhards say that it is.
We need government. We need regulation of business. We may need less of it in some areas, more of it in others, wiser deployments of resources all the way around. But the lesson of history -- as found in the pages of the books in your own libraries -- the lesson of history is that unregulated commerce, the Darwinian pursuit of self-interest, self-aggrandizement and profit by individuals and corporations leads not to some magical, moral, prosperous nirvana, but to cruelty and chaos, to exploitation, repression, racism, sexism, poverty, starvation and ultimately violence.
I do not mean to suggest that those who now beat the drum for lower taxes and less government -- contemporary conservatives -- wish for such things or even intend such things. I give them that benefit of the doubt even though they would have you believe -- and seem to have far too many people convinced -- that liberals would like nothing better than to create a socialist economic state in which free sexual expression is not just tolerated but mandated, and religion is criminalized.
This is not true. In fact it is the shade of a poisonous lie that has infected the political debate in this country such that the very word "liberal" itself has become an epithet. When Al Salvi won the Republican nomination for the Illinois U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Paul Simon, the attack faxes of the Democrats branded him as an arch-conservative, an ultra-conservative an extreme conservative and so on. The Repulican faxes attacking the Democratic nominee, Rep. Dick Durbin, branded him simply as liberal. The word has become so ugly to so many that it needs no modifier to do its dirty work -- "ultra" and "arch" have become redundant, implicit when used with the word "liberal." Durbin, accordingly, shunned the label, disowned it as if it were "libertine" or "leper." He insisted on being called "moderate."
"Liberal," though, is a perfectly good word and liberalism has a legacy to be proud of. For the past year or so I've made it my occasional mission in my column to try to rehabilitate the word, inject some pride back into it by injecting some history and common sense into the debate.
Liberalism is not goofy, it is not softheaded, it is not seditious, ruinous or ignorant of human nature. Liberalism is the socio-political philosophy that best addresses the perpetual conflict between human rights -- broadly defined -- and the exercise of human freedom; it is the philosophy that recognizes that concentrations of power and wealth can lead to evil, whether that concentration lies with state or with the private sector, and that government at its best is a balancing act; that government at its best protects individuals, often and particularly powerless and poor individuals, from forces in society that, unchecked, will tend to harm them.
If liberals are guilty of romanticizing the beneficial possibilities of government -- which we sometimes are -- that foolishness is more than matched by the romantic, even superstitious faith that conservatives place in the quote-unquote free market.
Liberalism, as many of you know and all of you could find out quickly at your places of employment, has its philosophical roots in a kind of utopianism -- the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that the natural order of things is perfection and that government ought to get out of the way as much as possible to let rational human beings exercise their reason and their rights in what will become a more or less perfect world. This was sort of John Locke's take on things in the 17th century, and it resembles much of what we think of today as libertarianism.
Some historians will argue that the Constitution of the United States is -- or was -- a quintessentaily liberal document because of the way that it enshrines the rights of individuals and seeks through separation of powers to check the impulses of government and majoritarian passions.
It's hard to say for sure, because Liberalism is not a set of rigid ideals or a dogma that one can track unerringly through the ages or apply with confidence to every social and political issue of today.
It is, as John F. Kennedy put it in a 1960 campaign speech, "an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability, through the experience of his reason and judgement, to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves."
This once meant an embrace of free markets. The belief in their ultimate goodness was a classically liberal idea. Adam Smith was considered a liberal for his belief that, and I quote, "By pursuing his own interest, man frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."
This airy confidence in the coincident growth of freedom, equality and opportunity looked a whole lot better when Smith wrote it and other liberals advanced it than it did in the late 19th and early 20th when an increasingly industrial society began exposing key elements of this philosophy as, well, incomplete. Naive probably doesn't overstate it.
It turned out that if you leave a factory owner or a railroad builder or a mine operator or the owner of the Standard Oil company to give free exercise to what he considers his natural rights, he does not typcially behave toward his workers like Ben and Jerry. He's known to exploit them, brutalize them, subjugate them and in a very literal sense, kill them -- witness the such bloody attempts to quell the the labor movement as the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1914, or such consequences of unsafe workplaces as the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire in New York in 1911, where 146 workers died, or Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, N.C., in which 25 workers were trapped and died in a chicken-processing warehouse.
The employer is known to cut whatever safety and environmental corners he thinks will help maximize short-term profits, yet, for some reason, Adam Smith's "unseen hand" does not reach out to keep workers and consumers safe and the air and water clean.
Looking back, what's surprising is that this was at all surprising to anyone. The institution of slavery -- pervasive in all but recent history -- illustrates pretty well that human desire for acquisition, power and self advancement, while not necessarily immoral was not necessarily moral, either.
And since the broad goal of liberalism was to enhance the dignity, autonomy and opportunity of individuals by protecting them against the powerful forces that have a tendency to usurp those rights, liberals found themselves examining the principal economic basis for their philosophy and saying ... "never mind."
Contemporary liberalism, which gets its start around 1900, realizes that the market economy can itself be a tyrant -- as cruel and subjugating and hostile to individuals as any bureaucracy, any monarch, any church.
These entities -- business, government, religion -- or, that is, the people in them, seek power and influence and often the wealth that goes with it. We all seek these things to some degree. It's part of our nature and I'd be the last to argue that this is necessarily all bad. Not at all. It is a spur to action, a spur to greatness, a spur to progress, a spur to jobs. Nothing wrong with striving. Nothing wrong with power. Bill Gates strove to be the king of software and not only employed thousands but made my life and probably yours easier.
But when that power accumulates, there often seems to be enough darkness in human nature to turn things ghastly for those left without.
Too much government is tyranny, fascism, oppression. Too little government tilts us toward anarchy, toward a brutal form of survival of the fittest in which those who can fill the power void will, and those who can be abused and subjugated -- historically women, racial and religious minorities, immigrants, children, the elderly, homosexuals, the disabled and laborers -- will be.
Contemporary liberalism, at its finest, fights against this abuse and subjugation by the extremes, curbs those instincts of the powerful, and, indeed considers those curbs morally imperative.
Conservatism, on the other hand, fights against the imposition of those curbs -- particularly when it comes to business and the church. Conservatism has adopted the faith in the free market that liberalism abandoned, while its partisans have argued for a greater role in public life for religion, all as part of conservatism's passion for order and traditional institutions.
Conservatives even embrace government power in many areas. Their anti-government slogans notwithstanding, they don't mind government at all when it comes to using the force of law to control what consenting people do and think and read, to invade their privacy, dictate their morals and, when they are suspected of wrongdoing, to brutalize them.
If liberalism is rooted in a utopian view of the inherent goodness of human beings, conservatism, all the way back to at least Edmund Burke in the late 18th century, has been rooted in an anti-utopian view of the inherent evil in human beings. The rude masses were not fit to rule themselves, to think for themselves -- and under such a construct, personal liberties, a free press, jury trials and so on became absurd. The elites and the church could handle such things.
Well, conservatism has changed, too, with the times. Contemporary conservatives -- many of whom I believe are well motivated -- would argue that today's pragmatic conservatives have their phillsophical hands full fighting against the excesses of the liberal instinct, the needless and counterproductive curbs liberals want to put on certain forms of behavior.
And they are not always wrong. And I will concede some liberal failings in a moment. But first I would like to observe that American society today and American people today are overwhelmingly and happily liberal by the standards of history.
Indeed it's my contention that if you were to make a list of the statements that most people who today call themselves conservative would subscribe to, and put one of them, say Rush Limbaugh, him back in time about 140 years or so and force him to procliam that list from a stage in a public park, the townsfolk would hang him on the spot as a wild-eyed radical:
Blacks should be allowed vote. Women should be allowed to vote. The military and schools should be fully integrated. We must have universal public education. Racial intermarriage should be legal. Workers should be allowed the right to organize. And so on.
Conservative pundit George Will wrote not long ago that a return to life as it was in 1900 "is a serviceable summation of the conservatives' goal." This invites a thought experiment: What would life be like today if the identifiably conservative point of view had held sway at every turn since 1900?
I envision a land of enforced conformity, censorship and little personal privacy where women and blacks are treated as sub-human; a land where the unharnessed free-market runs roughshod over employees , nearly all of whom work as temps so that short-term profits can be maximized, and victimizes consumers. A land where one can walk from Cleveland to Port Stanley on the industrial slime that was once Lake Erie, where public school teachers each morning lead students in prayers to Jesus; where the poor fend for themselves in third-world style ghettos, where the elderly are on their own for health care; and everything for children -- from schools to libraries -- is privatized so that those who have can have more.
It is the liberal impulse, the progressive impulse, that has given us integration in society, that has greatly expanded the rights of women, that has given us Social Security, , rural electrification, guaranteed bank deposits, Head Start, the GI Bill, school lunch programs, truth in packagaging, and has protected true freedom or worship. Remember, liberalism gave this country a New Deal because the old deal had turned out to be such a bad deal. It is liberalism that seeks to safeguard collective bargaining and limit the workplace exploitation of children, liberalism that has advanced the cause of clean air and water and safe consumer products, that has given us public housing and aid to families with dependent children.
It is also liberalism that has led the fight against heavyhanded government -- that has safeguarded freedom of speech, privacy rights, and the right to fair treatment by all from the police and the courts. And it will be liberals who will lead the fight against the heirs of Anthony Comstock in the "Family Friendly Libraries" organization -- a group that hopes to choke the flow of information by subjecting material in public libraries to approval by citizen majorities within individual communities.
They claim to be motivated by a desire to root out obscenity, but, as Church and State magazine reported last year, right-wing activists in Anderson County, South Carolina have already tried to have removed from libraries such books as "Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists."
To this, the obvious response is that we would not need guaranteed freedoms in this country, such as the First Amendment, if they were meant to apply only to popular ideas. That a library that offers only material approved by a majority of community residents is not a library at all, it's a warehouse for propaganda.
Don't hold your breath waiting for conservatives to make this argument for you. Don't wait for the people who say they're against big government to speak out against this looming Orwellian nightmare.
Yes, well, this is just the sort of talk conservatives would say they would expect to hear from a liberal journalist. They love to say that. "Liberal Journalist," the "liberal media." And it's true. Though we try to be fair, we do tend to be liberal.
Ever ask yourself why? It's because a big part of a reporter's mission is essentially a liberal one -- to shine the harsh light of truth on exploitation, to give voice to the afflicted and the aggrieved who would otherwise have no voice: Homeowners trying to do battle with a major, wealthy retail operation that wants to come in and spoil the peace of their community; children emotionally battered by the very bureaucracy that's supposed to look out for them; employees given the shaft; citizens wrongly accused of crimes; adult library patrons who'd like not to have their selection of reading material vetted by bluenoses.
And as reporters, we see these things, first hand. We see police and prosecutors lie, we see bureaucracies push people around, we see industry treat employers as a disposable resource and we see wealthy opportunitsts buy their way into the political system and use it to their own ends.
Modern liberals believe government is needed to support and enforce individual rights, to cushion individuals from the ups and downs of an economically and socially hazardous world. They believe that is the definition of a free society, not a definition that says the consequence of freedom is that power, control and money go to whoever can grab them, and government exists primarily to protect people and private property from immediate physical harm.
Most conservatives today will say, yeah, well, so liberals were right about race and gender and ... the environment and ... workplace safety and ... health care for the elderly and poor ... rights of workers to organize ... and ... well, enough, now we've come a long way with them, but we don't need them anymore.
Wrong.
We still need liberals when conservatives concerned about illegal immigration in California move to punish the children of those immgrants, not the employers who feed the problem by cheerfully hiring illegals.
We still need liberals when in the name of progress conservatives are cutting fund for enforcement of workplace health and safety laws and for protection of our clean air and water.
We still need liberals whe the minimum wage reaches a 40 year low in purchasing power and the conservatives who strive to keep it there continue to gripe and wonder about the unmotivated underclass.
We still need liberals when industry's response to the diminished power of unions it to accellerate downsizing and outsourcing -- the New Republic reports, for example, that the owner of an Ypsilanti, Mich., auto parts plant have threatened to shut down in unionized workers don't accpet a 64 percent pay cut -- and the New York Times quotes an AT&T Vice President that his company wants the workforce to be "contingent," as we move into an economy that's "jobless, but not workless."
We still need liberals when we can't agree on what's good news; when AT&T's stock jumps 3 points in response to news of their massive layoffs, and the entire market plunges 171 points at the report that nearly 3 million to 4 million jobs had beeen created in February and the unemployment rate was down to 5.5 percent.
We still need liberals when the income gap between rich and poor yawns to its greatest width since such records have been kept and conservatives simply deny the social significance of this and make excuses for CEOs who earned only 35 times the salary of an average U.S. worker 22 years ago but now, according to the latest estimates, makes more than 200 times the average salary.
We still need liberals when conservatives want to cut legal aid for the poor, and repeal the National School Lunch Act of 1946, the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, and the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983.
We still need liberals when we have higher rates of infant mortality, illiteradcy, malnutiriton and poverty than any other advanced, civilized nation.
We still need liberals when conservatives are willing to torch the ideals of the Constituiont in order to take their revenge upon the handful of idiot every year who burn the American flag.
We still need liberals when the growth of the internet makes it inevitable that public institutions -- such as libraries -- are all that stands to bridge a dangerously widening infomation gap between rich and poor.
And yet.
Liberals have erred, because, like the rapacious capitalists and would-be generalissimos in government against whom we try to be so vigilant, we have not known when to stop.
Did we remain silent about certain overregulations that allowed this cause the cause of environmentalism to become a joke in many circles?
Yes we did.
Did we fail to see the hellish drawbacks of high-rise public housing?
Yes we did.
Did we also fail to anticipate and work to head off chronic, mulit-generational welfare dependency?
Yes we did.
Did we overemphasize the self -- self-gratification, self-realization -- at the expense of the family and the community?
Yes we did.
Did we focus so much on criminals' rights that we appeared soft on crime?
Yes we did.
Did we worry so much about individual rights and freedoms that we forgot to talk about individual reponsibilities and duties?
Yes we did.
Did we fail to guard against the excessive and damaging behavior which even the downtrodden, oppressed and reviled are capable of?
Yes we did.
Did we fear, irrationally, applying the same ethical standards to individuals that we have applied throughout history to institutions?
Yes we did.
In short, did we fail to broaden and adapt our definitions of exploitation and freedom to reality?
Yes we did.
The key failing of the liberal approach in the modern world has been a blindness to the simple fact that it is not only the politician, the business owner, the church leader, the policeman and others with obvious power who need to be restrained lest they harm others.
We have not seen that it is also individuals, ordinary citizens, those commonly defined and thought of as powerless. They too have a tendency to abuse, to take advantage, to exploit when they are able.
Unions can, I say can be an example of this -- enforcing rules in the name of worker protection that end up not only offending the cherished connection between effort and reward but also harming businesses, and, most notably, the customers, the everday citizens, who patronize those businesses.
The poor. There are welfare loafers, cheats, rank freeloaders who have been empowered by the welfare system -- designed to protect them -- to the point that they are taking advantage of -- exploiting -- those everyday citizens who help pay their way. I suspect this number is not as large as many would like you to think, but I know that it should not be a sin against liberal orthodoxy to declare that such people exist. It should not be a sin against liberal orthodoxy to condemn such people, to demand honest effort from them, to hold them at least somewhat accountable.
The sexually irreponsible. Liberals reject the idea that government or church influcences should control sexual expression among consenting adults. They recognize this as incompatible with human liberty. But to the extent that encouraging sexual license has weakened marriage, liberals have to realize that children -- the true powerless innocents in virtually any paradigm -- suffer...have suffered. It should not be a sin against liberal orthodoxy to defend and encourage lasting committments, to warn against sexual exploitation and experimentation that experience has shown us can bring harm and heartache to others.
Though I must just interject here that the manner in which our entertainments in this nation are drenched with sex and violence is an example of the free market at work.
Criminals. The ultimate petty exploiters of the powerless. But in proclaiming our concern that they not be unfairly used by the justice system, with its tendency to abuse its power, we liberals have yielded the anti-crime high ground -- we have ceded that territory to the so-called law-and-order crowd whose solutions to this problem are often expensive, counterproductive and brutal in ways that threaten the innocent as well as the guilty. But, again, we have ceded that territory because we have focused too much of our concern on the criminal -- how he was warped by a rough upbringing and perhaps abused by the justice system -- and not enough concern on the actual victim....the innocent who has been harmed. In our concern for rehabilitiation and rights, we have failed -- again, I think, due to a misunderstanding of the meaning of liberalism -- to stand up as we should for law and order. In our tendency to attack and mistrust institutions, we have failed to be in the forefront of a demand for tough, smart,
effective and fair enforcement of just laws.
Bureaucrats. Liberals do believe in government's ability to address problems and provide solutions. And it is a belief born out by a litany of successes. James Carville lists some of them in his recent book: The Earned Income Tax Credit. Head Start. FEMA. The Clean Water Act, Centers for Disease Control. Medicare. Medicade. The EPA. OSHA. The Consumer Product Safety Commission. The GI Bill. The Interstate Highway System. The National Park System. The Peace Corps. Sesame Street. The Women and Infant Children special supplemental food program. These are not unalloyed successes, of course. Even good programs serving the powerless can become bloated and arrogant and ridiculous -- as Mike Royko's recent column on OSHA's dense regulations concerning the handling of water in the workplace demonstratred. And bloated, arrogant ridiculous programs waste money.
This, again, creates a powerless victim class. But it has been against liberal orthodoxy to speak out against such waste when it is supposedly in the service of a higher good. It has been against liberal orthodoxy to demand efficiency and performance along with good intentions in government.
Not to have done so -- not to have spoken out against wasteful bureaucrats, criminals, the sexually irreponsible and those in the underclass, organized labor and elsewhere who have abused their power, even though in response to other abuses -- has both made us enablers of certain societal pathologies and weakened the integrity of the liberal position.
Our silence has allowed many commentators to suggest to the mainstream public that liberalism has no integrity. And to the extent that we have failed to see beyond our narrow orthodoxy, they have been right.
Liberals have failed to see that their insight about the tendency of institutions to attempt to gather as much power as possible and to abuse that power, to take advantage, seems to be a human trait. Insitutions only have this trait because they are made up of human beings -- some of whom (not all of whom but enough of whom) are sufficiently amoral that they cannot, overall, be trusted.
How this insight has escaped us is beyond me. The evidence for it is everywhere.
Though there may be and is great kindness in the world, great wisdom and gentility and altruism, there is not enough of it to justify a utopian philosophy that says that rational human beings freely exercising their reason and their rights will create anything like a perfect world.
This historical premise of liberalism is wrong. And if liberalism is going to make any sense in the next century, it is going to have to adjust again, as it did around the beginning of the last century, to accomodate the truths that have become obvious. It is going to have to broaden, again, its defintion of that which threatens the dignity, autonomy and opportunity of the individual.
Because some of what the conservatives say is true. Liberals, left to their own devices, would over-regulate business, over-tax wealth and over-encourage non-comformity. And in the long run, this would backfire. Businesses would close, work would be devalued and families and communities -- the cradle of meaningful liberty in my opinion -- would begin to disintegrate.
Correcting course will not be easy because so many conflicting imperatives, rights and considerations exist. Overcorrecting is as dangerous as not correcting at all, and history tells us that, no matter what we come up with, we won't settle the great questions definitively for the ages, and, no matter what we come up with, time may not be kind to it.
Nevertheless, in the coming years liberals must take the lead in seeking common-sense, Constitutional curbs to behavior that compassion and tax money alone cannot solve. We must correct the impression that we don't know or don't care about the difference between individual behavior that is right and wrong, good and bad. We pride ourselves, after all, on being a moderating influence. And if we don't attempt to broaden that influence, we will lose it.
To the extent that conservatism is motivated by the desire to move us in that direction and balance the most errant of our impulses, I respect it. I talk and write to a lot of people in my line of work, many of them are conservatives and many of them seem to me to be geniunely concerned with how liberal failings and traditional liberal ideas can, do and have harmed society.
Yet I think others -- too many others -- are as much or more concerned with simply protecting what they have and guarding their opportunities to aquire more. They fear and distrust people who are not like them and contrive intellectually to blame such people for the difficulties they have and the suffering they endure.
They dislike government when it attempts to force business not to discriminate, not to befoul the environment, not to pay the lowest wages they can get away with. They don't like government when it attempts to redistribute power and influence in society by, in effect, taking some from them and giving it to others.
Such confiscation may not sound fair to those in the philosophical salons. One should keep what one can earn and have only the fruits of one's labor. It sounds almost like a first principle of a free nation.
But it turns out to be yet another brand of utopianism that doesn't "work," that doesn't account for human nature, that doesn't result in the sort of society in which you or I would really like to live.
For example, the rule and practice could be, if you want a book, you must buy it. If you want information, you must pay for it. And you can have only as much opportunity to enjoy and learn from such material as your fortune and hard work allows -- though of course you only have access to that which can be profitably sold.
Instead we have something greater.
Instead we have something far more moral, far more decent, far more befitting a culture that aspires to greatness.
Instead we have places of common enterprise that seek to smooth off the rough edges of fate and blunt the will of those who would restrict the ideas and opportunities of the unpopular and the less fortunate.
Instead we have something that illustrates the wisdom of liberalism, a wisdom this nation validates every day, a wisdom of which liberals ought to take pride.
Instead we have public libraries.
Thank you very much.