Very informative post, and I was hoping you'd weigh in on this.

Thanks for the link to their budget and salary scales, which I looked for and didn't find on my own. I'm no expert, and you probably have a clearer picture of library costs than I do, but I'm not seeing anything in these charts that would average out to $500,000 for ten employees. After the single $51,000 position, the next highest is $39,000, and I agree with you that all these salaries--including the director's--look quite reasonable to me for this area.

I am now wondering where the hell that $500,000 number came from, and I think you can understand why averaged over ten employees that would look kind of high.

For the record, I do not consider my tax money being spent on libraries as one of my Top Ten examples of horrible government waste, and also for the record, I actually voted for money for our local library to build a new building, and have voted myself tax increases for other local projects on more than one occasion. Key word here being "local."

In other words, if I lived there, I would probably not be interested in dying on this particular hill. I find it a little hard to believe that $500 of that guy's taxes are being earmarked for libraries--that would be a huge chunk of my property taxes and I live in Silicon Valley. I would venture a guess that there are quite a few other money ratholes eating that cash.

That being said, from a theoretical standpoint, of course, I still do not believe the government has a role in maintaining libraries as such. I believe that better alternatives would have been developed without taxpayer money, but in the real world you often have to work with what the system has handed you, while hopefully still being able to keep your eyes on the long-term goal.

Your example of the rural roads was an interesting one, although I think most local roads are funded at the county level. One wonders how things would have developed had rural utilities not been tax subsidized. Would we have been unable to run farms, and wrecked the country? Or would farms now be the largest customer of solar power systems? A more realistic scenario would probably have been the formation of farm cooperatives to fund such things, but I guess we'll never know.