Borrowing books is not embracing totalitarianism or seizing private property. Libraries are not attempts to monopolize healthcare or fleece taxpayers to pay for everybody’s tuition.

Benjamin Franklin is generally credited with starting the first private libraries in America at a time when books were scarce. Some continue to exist as a membership organizations, like the Boston Athenaeum and similar institutions.

Many of today’s public libraries were created thanks to private funding such as the Carnegie Foundation. Now, yes government owns some of the buildings, and frankly most libraries are obsolete.

It is quite amazing what people will do to sugarcoat the failures of socialism throughout history. From claiming libraries are socialist to characterizing highly taxed capitalist countries in Europe as examples of “success”. They conveniently forget about Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Castro’s Cuba as real life examples of the horrors of collectivism.