[Protagoras]

Daytime flophouses for indigent welfare parasites.

To force me, at gunpoint if necessary, to pay for someone else's reading material, is immoral. So are all the other wealth transfer schemes.

[Liberal Classic]

The first library in America was started by Ben Franklin, called the Philidelphia Library Company. Pertinent to this discussion, it was was a subscription service costing 10 shillings a year to check out their titles. Non-members could check out books if they put up some collateral. Putting aside for a moment the question of whether public libraries should receive tax money, wouldn't checking out a book and not returning it be theft?

[patton]

LOL. you have got to be kidding.

Thomas Jefferson was broke and about to be homeless, so congress bought his book collection - "The Library of Congress," as it were.

Libraries are community memory banks - I don't mind paying for them.

Broke ex presidents, now - I say, let them sleep in the gutter.