No, I’m not supporting the MidPointe Library System tax levy in Butler County, Ohio.  They want too much money for a product that is only good for Democrats.  Libraries these days tend to be breeding grounds for liberals so I tend not to like them anyway.  And I say that as a person who probably loves books more than anybody, locally, regionally, or this side of the Mississippi River.  I would say that books are my number one love in the world, I read around three books per week and on all kinds of different topics.  I think they are excellent ways to advance human civilization and the perpetuation of knowledge.  And in their infancy, I would say libraries were a good idea so that people who couldn’t afford books, or couldn’t get access to them any other way, could get access to vast amounts of information.  But those days are long gone. These days, libraries are meeting centers for radical Democrats who are plotting to take over the world one child at a time.  And they just aren’t worth the money.  There is a strong socialist vibe to libraries where sharing is their centerpiece.  I haven’t been to a library for three decades.  I did have one summer, my first one after graduating high school where I went to the library several times a week to read lots and lots of books.  But I hated to take them back, and since then I have just bought all my books each week.  I had wished that I had been able to keep all those books that I read out of the library, rather than taking them back because for me reading is a conquest, and I like to look at them later.  And to refer to them often.  So even though the books at the library are free, you don’t get to keep those adventures after and can’t refer to them over the years as brain development grows because ownership isn’t the key feature of libraries.  Sharing knowledge is, and that’s not really what book reading is all about.  It’s about transferring knowledge from one person to another, not in some socialist utopia of mass understanding.  That might have been a noble concept, but certainly not the reality. 

The cost of the MidPointe Library system in Butler County, Ohio, is $43.75 in taxes per $100,000 of home.  But who lives in a $100K home these days? Such a place would be a shack by today’s standards.  So, the actual cost of the levy to the average resident is around $150.  The library system will tell everyone that they serve around 600,000 visitors annually.  There are 400,000 people in Butler County, so we are talking about a lot of people, but with all that activity, we have not seen much of an increase in literacy or proper political thinking.  Libraries have become, over time, gathering places for Democrats because of their free access to information that brings out the degenerates into one place.  Most of the time, Republican-minded people don’t gather at the library to talk about a book.  They gather there to meet on below-the-line topics that work against individualism, which is why, even as an avid reader, I have not been back to a library in decades.  The MidPointe Library System does have a presence in Liberty Center Mall, which looks good from the food court.  I prefer a bookstore like Barnes and Noble to a library where moochers are attracted to the free aspect of getting a book, taking it home, reading it, and then bringing it back for someone else to share in that experience.  I like that people want to read books, but I like it better when they want to buy them and turn knowledge into a possession.  Not a shared experience. 

The MidPointe Library System says that for every dollar spent on a library, there is a return to the regional economy of $5 to $9 as if to justify the enormous expense of justifying them for the public. But I don’t see the massive expansion of intelligence that such a return on investment projects.  Literacy is way down where it clearly shouldn’t be.  Our education system for kids is a trash heap that carries over into the library system; people are learning all the wrong things.  It’s not enough to have an education; somewhat, what we learn truly matters.  And the kind of books that libraries offer are not exactly bastions of conservative value.  So, even if the return on investment is high, we have to question whether it’s the right kind of dollars for the correct type of investment.  We live in a time where the Internet has been the most significant decentralization of information in the history of the world, and more people have access to information that way than through a library card.  The rate at which people can consume information is much higher than it has ever been.  So why do we have literacy problems when just about every human being these days reads more than ever through online services and texting between associates? We value this kind of knowledge because places like public schools and libraries steer people toward the wrong thinking process.  People need physical assets to remind them of what they experienced.  Not taken back to the library and stored for some other slack-jawed loser to come along and have equal opportunity to acquire that knowledge.

The value of the library isn’t knowledge as individuals possess it; it’s in the shared community values of sameness.  They are essentially communist concepts because of their shared trait.  I was reminded of this the other day while at Half Priced Books, which I love.  But usually, they deal with books from personal collections and libraries that have failed somewhere, and they have a similar feel to libraries, where the books have been previously owned and have the emotional residue of other people on them.  Half Priced Books is an excellent place to find treasures that have been forced underground or out of print.  But like most things of value, we don’t share our food, we don’t share our spouses, and we don’t share our books, our traveled knowledge acquired through a lot of work and personal investment.  After you’ve read a book, you should keep the book as a trophy of the journey.  You don’t share it with some other slug; never to return to it later.  I have found that I reread many books at different periods of my life as my intellect grows.  What you read in your twenties tends to modify when you are forty or fifty because of brain development.  So, for all those reasons and more, I would like to see the MidPointe Library System go away and the people who typically go there fade away into the distance.  Libraries tend to make more Democrats by facilitating their socialist whims and are significant impediments to the kind of proper emotional growth that healthy human beings would otherwise evolve into.  Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s right.  Experiences are not the same as possession of knowledge.  And reading a book is only a small part of gaining experience.  Taking an experience back to the library so somebody else can “experience” it too is a concept of Marx and the rest of the below-the-line Europeans who got information sharing wrong right out of the gate as the printing press was invented.  Libraries might have been a benefit initially when people couldn’t afford books, but the marketplace has made books so easily accessible that owning books is better.  And why I will vote No on the MidPointe Library Tax Levy in the 2024 election. 

Rich Hoffman

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