Salt Lake County is constructing a new taxpayer-funded crystal palace library on the corner of 500 East and 3300 South in South Salt Lake. The library is a half block away from the Calvin Smith Library.
The Calvin Smith Library was built in a day when people went to the library to find books. So the architecture is a little more subdued. The old building is still a perfectly fine library.
Industry Reports claim that that there has been a 31% decrease in the use of local public libraries. This decline is due to a new thing called "The Internet" which provides free access to collections of books that dwarf the limited information available at the public library.
The county has unlimited access to tax-payer money. Since there are no economic incentives to match their spending to market demand, there is nothing that stops the state from dumping millions of dollars on projects like this.
The library has a huge lawn. We will probably see a homeless camp appear on the lawn of this library just as there is one at the main public library in Salt Lake.
I have a fondness of ornate buildings. I've wondered why businesses don't build ornate buildings for their operations.
I discovered the answer a while back when my employer was building a new office.
It turns out that private companies pay taxes.
They don't just pay small amounts of taxes. They pay huge amounts in taxes.
Every penny that a company spends on its building will be taxed at increasingly higher rates. So, if a company built a ten million dollar building, the state will demand several times that ten million dollars in the expected lifecyle of the building.
A 5% property tax means that the owners of the building must pay the cost of the building every 20 years. The taxes are on the assessed value of the property. The assessed value is essentially whatever the county assessor says the building is worth.
Businesses are wise to have the least amount of building necessary for their particular business. Business must avoid the flourishes that would increase the property value. Their efforts to create a better living environment for the people in the community will make the business a target for aggressive tax collectors.
The state can build ornate buildings because the state doesn't pay the same taxes as private business. This is a really clever trick because advocates of socialism can point to the crystal palaces built by the state and snear about how much better socialism is than liberty.
The state is in the position to take money from others while private firms must provide items of value to customers to earn their position.
This is the building being replaced.
The Pinapple Experiment
I am publishing with #waivio . Waivio does not give me the ability to edit the markdown. I grabbed the GPS code for the new library from Pinmapple map. I stripped the markdown. I hope that the picture shows up on Pinmapple.
!pinmapple 40.699491 lat -111.876348 long d3scr
