Where Do Libraries Come From, Mama?

This Canadian lambasting of British author (and dirtbag du jour) Philip Pullman is a thing of beauty.  Here's just a bit (the last paragraph is just magnificent):

I share Pullman’s biliousness at seeing public libraries fall victim to an economic crisis caused by financiers, demented property-flippers, and short-sighted Labour governments. But then, he doesn’t have much to say about Labour. That would be class treason, one supposes. And, anyway, he is much too busy poking fun at Tory cabinet fatty Eric Pickles—while simultaneously complaining about the injustice of ad-hominem attacks. 

Whenever the “how dare you tamper with my favourite public service” argument is made, and no less when it is made on behalf of what may actually be my own favourite public service, I always wonder what actually existing utopia the arguer would like us to imitate. What country has the perfect, pristine, progressive library policy, and what makes it so? Pullman not only fails to identify any candidate; he is apparently furious at the idea that some particular policy about libraries, set by those responsible for their funding, should exist at all. “The leader of the county council said in the Oxford Times last week that the cuts are inevitable, and invites us to suggest what we would do instead,” said Pullman. “…I don’t think we should accept his invitation. It’s not our job to cut services. It’s his job to protect them.” How readily, in the hands of an experienced prose artist, is irresponsibility magnified into an ideology. 

One cannot escape the suspicion that Pullman believes libraries somehow grow out of soil festooned with magic library-beans. Doesn’t he know that the crucial figure in the history of public libraries was Andrew Carnegie—perhaps the most satanically successful apostle of the free market that ever lived? Carnegie’s fortune was used, for most of 50 years, to build a magnificently appointed public library for almost any community in the English-speaking world that wanted one. Six hundred and sixty of them were erected in the UK alone. Libraries as we know and use them are, essentially, Carnegie’s creation—a by-product, every bit as much as the plume of a smokestack, of the highest of high capitalism. Pullman should probably just die from embarrassment at having abused industrialists and classical liberals in such a context.