Starving the Beast
I must be bored lately cause I’ve been reading the Letters to the Editor page, sort of on par with following the aptly named Yahoo News, which mostly thinks news is the fashion faux pas of movie stars or the recent exploits of the Kardashian Klan. I guess this may just be the pulse of the nation. Yesterday an aggrieved writer weighed in on Camano’s ballot measure to build a permanent library. Waste of money, he concluded, when we could just do it privately. “Like they do in lots of places.” Big community fundraiser is what we need, he said. Privately operated. Gather up bequests. Do it ourselves. Anything but a tax supported quasi-governmental library.
I guess the $40,000 we raised to pay the rent for two years at the current pilot library wasn’t ‘community’ enough for this guy. That, and the volunteers manning the phone banks for weeks at a time don’t qualify either. Or voting to tax ourselves isn’t what he considers ‘community-minded.’ Just another example of Big Government.
Some folks just want everything privatized, I guess. They think that way they won’t have to pay for it. Fire departments used to be private. Sign up, they’ll fight a fire when your house catches; skip the payments, they’ll watch it burn. If you’re poor, tough luck ….
I wouldn’t mind, maybe, all of us community minded yahoos banding together, raising funds, auctioning off art and the usual items, baking cookies for the Bake Sale, organizing a board, volunteering to work for gratis so my tax averse friends can save a dollar or three then use the services for free, but I’m worried we’ll want fire protection privately funded next and police services based on donations soon to follow and road repairs done only if given enough bequests that year. My guess is this is how you Starve the Beast, but you ask me — and I know you didn’t — this is how you make a jungle.
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