"Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value." by Philip Pullman

This is as good a starting point as any. Philip Pullman with wit and passion laying out the case against small(-minded) government and showing why precisely it is that markets are necessary but not sufficient, and are capable at once of great good and tremendous harm. The article really is a must-read for all, but especially those libertarians and small-government conservatives who think that the state is a mostly malignant force.



The subject is the closing of public libraries in Oxfordshire to bring budgets in line with the cuts being dictated from Westminster. Libraries will be able to make bids for funding from a central funding pot (a pittance, really), and will be expected to run off of volunteers. Pullman says:

What I personally hate about this bidding culture is that it sets one community, one group, one school, against another. [...] And it always results in victory for one side and defeat for the other. It’s set up to do that. It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market.

Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. I think that little by little we’re waking up to the truth about the market fanatics and their creed. We’re coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we know, everything we thought was safe and solid. It is the most powerful solvent known to history. “Everything solid melts into air,” he said. “All that is holy is profaned.

I realize that the citation of Marx will only turn off most American readers (especially those libertarians and conservatives I mentioned before). But laying that to one side, it sums up nicely, I think, the philosophical case against what on the far left is called "market imperialism" - that is to say, the steady creep of the market into areas where it was never dominant before. Markets are good at some things. But preserving things that are "humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent" is not one of them.

In this blog I will be posting selections from and musings on some things that I've read recently - articles, books, poems, whatever strikes my fancy. They will be things that I agree with and disagree with, things that fill me with admiration and disgust, passion and apathy, all manner of things. I read a lot of news and many of them will be news-related; I read a lot of literature and many of them will be literature-related. I hope they will all be interesting. Do please let me know in the comments box.