Feel free

"Freebird wasn't really free." He was probably that guy, the one who made that argument on the way back from the Skynyrd show. "It cost somewhere between 1/15 and 1/10 of the ticket price, factoring in the solos, and not including how much of your cigarette lighter you used up."

And now forty or so years later he's trying to argue that you can replace public libraries with Starbucks, and he's breaking the Internet by getting stuffed for it, before retreating to the position that "public libraries aren't free anyway. You have to pay taxes for them."

Economics isn't free either. There's a cost for its truncated visions of human nature: you can't save the last dance for homo oeconomicus unless you want to be stepped all over while having cost-benefit analyses whispered in your ear.

Not that economics isn't without imagination when it comes to the concept of "free." But, as one might expect from someone who devalues the waltz per se, its products along this line take on some perverse characteristics, e.g. laissez-faire a.k.a. "free market" capitalism, for which we can credit the entrenchment of chattel slavery in the American cotton lands.

I don't doubt that economists argue with St. Peter at the pearly gates of Free Grace heaven. "Free? What do you mean free? Jesus died for that grace! And the value of his life alone was, what, 33 years time $130,000, or $4,290,000 in today's dollars! So you have to figure the fraction of ..." at which point Free Grace Peter refers the economist down the cloud to where Prosperity Gospel Peter is collecting admissions fees.

The point that these economists make is so obvious that the only answer is really to turn it back by saying, "You're missing the point." The point of free public libraries was well-known when they were established in the middle of the 19th century. The point was to leverage self-education through tax-supported institutions that promoted reading by providing free access to books. The point was to eliminate a monetary quid pro quo for a book by spreading the necessary support around like a thin layer of manure on the spring corn.

This was in Boston, where besides manure on spring corn everyone also understood "free beer" to mean that however it was being paid for, the saloon-keeper was giving you a frothy mug in exchange for exactly nothing. The hope was that libraries -- with their offer of free books -- would be able to draw some of the clientele from the saloons.

This didn't exactly happen, although public libraries have become a not-insubstantial marketplace for illegal drugs, which, however, have the very non-library, ironic downside of not being free. As if to demonstrate, at the nearby reference desk, is our spaced-out, for-profit, drug-industry economist arguing with the nice librarian that, in getting "high," one does not physically attain altitude, and then threatening her that she should go "get stoned" unless she accepts his demand for her dowry because "can't buy me love" be damned!

Part of what we are experiencing here is "the tragedy of the Commons," in which the Lords are past the point of making a positive contribution to society, so the police are called and the economist gets the criminal justice version of interlibrary loan: a free ride to jail.

With handcuffs! Lagniappe! Laissez-faire les bons temps rouler!