Who would have ever thought it?

My Little Free Library war: How our suburban front-yard lending box made me hate books and fear my neighbors

Short form: A writer for Salon has come to realize that when he put one of those “Little Free Library” things out in his front years that what he *wasn’t* doing was setting up a place for people to exchange books, but a place for people to just pick up free stuff. That his neighbors, a bunch of “Progressive” stereotypes by way of “Graying gardeners and aging hippies; Bernie-or-Bust types; millennial parents, tatted and pierced, shepherding toddlers with names like Arya,” have assumed that anything that can be taken is actually free for the taking.

Welcome to adulthood, pal. People will steal anything that ain’t nailed down, and a lot of things that are. *Especially* if they’ve been misraised to believe that private property rights aren’t sacred, that all property is or should be communal, that they are entitled to free stuff. This is a variant of the Tragedy of the Commons. People see no repercussions if they simply permanently abscond with the books, perhaps even sell them on ebay; so what do they care?

As a lover of books and someone who wishes to share knowledge, when the “Little Free Library” things first started popping up a few years back I contemplated setting one up out front. Then it dawned on me that, without some enforcement mechanism, I’d do just as well to simply pile books atop a garbage can.