A Virginia public library is fighting off a takeover by private equity
183 comments
·July 10, 2025anon7000
II2II
I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
energy123
Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed. Design a system that manages human nature, pointing it in a direction that is beneficial, while taming its side effects.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
arunabha
> Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed.
The statement might appear to be pedantically true, but it's not true in practice. Sure, greed cannot be eliminated, but you certainly have systems which control the actions which result from greed. In reality, the actions brought on by greed are the real problem and we have an entire branch of the US govt(the legislature) dedicated to setting up mechanisms(laws) to discourage unwanted actions via threat of consequences.
So, it's certainly possible to mitigate the effects of greed. What people are pointing out is that of late corporations(and more specifically the C suite) have faced few if any consequences for detrimental behaviour driven by greed.
Hence the problem.
p_v_doom
Human nature is not greed though. Human nature is very very varied and adaptive. And the historical norm of human nature is one of sharing, community and support, as much as such a claim can even be made. And human nature is subject to the whole bigger system in which it lives.
Capitalism is in many ways such a system, one that is built around driving the worst parts of human nature. And the thing is the profit motive becoming pathological is not a bug. This is the key defining feature of the system. Capitalism really isnt even about markets. Its about consumption, and producing things specifically to sell them in order to make some markup. The goal is specifically to find ways to make money, and stuff like fulfilling peoples needs, quality, workers rights, and regulations are clearly things that are getting in the way.
TFYS
> centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
The local knowledge problem might have been an issue with central planning a few decades ago, but I don't think it is anymore. Everyone now has in their pocket a device with which they're able to instantly send any kind of information anywhere. We now have computers and software powerful enough to process all this information. The price mechanism is an ancient, inefficient and slow way to transmit information compared to what we could achieve today if we really wanted to.
People have all kinds of incentives other than profit. People wouldn't just lie down and die if they couldn't make money by owning things. The failures of past attemps at planning had more to do with the limited technology they had and the poor decision-making structure that centralized power and allowed too much corruption. That doesn't mean planning will always have that kind of a result.
> a government not influenced by money
This is impossible in capitalism, which will always over time create concentrations of capital large enough that influencing the people in government will become affordable, no matter how hard you make it. Government is just people, and there'll always be ways to influence people using money. In a well designed government it would be hard and expensive, but you can never make it impossible. Eventually a corporation or an individual will become so wealthy that they can afford it, and at some point conditions will arise where influencing the government will be a cheaper way to increase profits than fairly competing in the market.
fsckboy
>I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
BrenBarn
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
leoedin
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
dmurray
I don't understand how massive corporations are both ruthless slash and burn cost-cutting profit optimizers and sloppy businessmen who don't care about the small things, even in aggregate.
What's the economics of not renting out high street retail properties? There must be millions of them across the first world, with a theoretical annual rent roll in the 11 or 12 figures. Are they owned by a million multinational conglomerates foregoing a hundred grand each? In that case we are stretching the definition of "multinational conglomerate". Or are they concentrated in the hands of the same hundred companies? In that case they are each missing out on ten billion a year in opportunity. There isn't a company in the world where you couldn't make your name as Head of Global Unused Property managing ten billion a year of revenue.
I don't have an answer for this either, but it must be more complicated than "they're all owned by multinationals who don't care about such small numbers" - the point of multinational companies is that those numbers are no longer small at scale.
chii
> And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched
so the problem isn't with profit after all, it's with low competition? So what is causing the lack of competition in the sector? Why can't that problem be fixed?
arjvik
Is there a way to reward and incentivize improving human well being?
Perhaps a society where all income comes from the government in proportion to how much one improves the overall well being of society?
(Yes, it's difficult to measure this objectively, and even harder to agree on what the priorities for societal well being are)
kortilla
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible under freedom of religion and just independent thought generally.
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
UBI would go a long ways to enforcing democracy. Money talks, so just give people money. Everything else is too abstract. We can't seem to encode justice into law but at least if everyone got UBI it would be harder to oppress poor people
(half serious)
null
zx8080
> A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society.
Not surprising considering the profit is taken from people in the society.
burnt-resistor
Public-private "partnerships" backed by private equity will always raise prices, cut costs arbitrarily, reduce service, take out loans, and saddle the organization with debt to pay themselves huge dividends before driving it into bankruptcy. This is what happens when corrupt, unregulated capitalism is allowed to run amok and have zero skin in the game except to extract maximum profit like vampires.
typewithrhythm
Conceptually neoliberal societys do not have a strong way to seperate community and social goals from economic ones, because their very philosophy is that prosperity creates social improvement.
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
mkw5053
Interesting pattern here: manufacture a crisis (book banning complaints → funding cuts), then propose private "efficiency" as the solution. Meanwhile, this library was founded in 1799, is the second-oldest in Virginia, just won the 2024 state Library of the Year award, and had 400k+ checkouts last year. Hardly sounds broken.
anigbrowl
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library/ Line up to the mind cemetery now/ What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'/ They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
hulitu
It worked so well in Europe with train companies, energy companies and local utilities.
psalaun
And they keep going for it: in France the neoliberal government is pushing further the privatisation of railroad (they ask the national company to invest in the shared infrastructure, but spare the competition from this burden; then they will probably point out how the private competitors are more cost efficient), subway and buses in Paris, they renew the private management of public funded highways despite them being a cash machine, they let the public hospitals understaffed to the point that many medium sized cities do not have 24/7 access anymore to emergency services, and now many colleagues and friends of mine prefer to go in private hospitals
jmyeet
In American politics, this has been an incredibly successful strategy, most notably starting with Reagan. It's called "starving the beast" [1]. The playbook is simple:
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/6789512f-8775-450b-b0a6-9d9d0c371...
klank
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
bitmasher9
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
markdown
2 examples, one from half a century ago?
mcmoor
By this point, I suspect that PE is simply a sophisticated liquidation service. Where an owner doesn't want to deal with a company anymore and want to cash out, but can't just easily sell everything. By this perspective, any fault on a company's discontinuation lies solely with whoever sold it to a PE as it's him who actually wants to kill it.
jmyeet
I consider PE to be equivalent to a crypto rugpull.
There's PE the theory and PE the practice.
The theory is that the buyers improve operational efficiency, restructure the business, dispose of underperforming assets, etc and "transform" the business. As another commenter reminded me, there are a handful of examples of this, most notably HIlton. And any of these successes will throw around "operational efficiency" a lot. Maybe Blackstone really did massively improve Hilton's operations. If so, I still consider it an outlier.
PE in practice seems much closer to the 1980s corporate raiders. It's done by people who have zero understanding of the business and zero interest in it. They've essentially decided to do a rugpull and ripoff the new owners so the "financial engineering" is how to structure the exploding debt in such a way that the new buyers don't realize it before it's too late.
That seems to be the case with many high-profile cases such as Toys'R'Us and Red Lobster.
I personally think this model of loading up a company with debt to pay off the LBO should be illegal.
0x3444ac53
For anyone curious about what books the group wanted banned:
https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
Here's an opinion pledge where they stated their demands: https://royalexaminer.com/parents-matter-make-the-pledge/
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
[0]: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/catholic-library-supporters-...
Books:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91010302-you-need-to-chi... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16YUZFgYY2/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53241064-this-is-why-the... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16kKwC3PDD/
Found the list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRzUaZiy2h4gi-c_...
MyOutfitIsVague
The library should serve the entire community, not a loud minority or even exclusively the majority. If 20% of the community wants LGBTQ books, 30% don't, and 50% don't care, why should the 30% be able to decide that the other 20% shouldn't have access to these books? The majority should not be able to strip rights that the minority should have access to. Tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
0x3444ac53
It's the loudness of the minority that wants them banned. That, and the fact that they are often people who have enough privilege (land owning, ability to take off work to go to council meetings, and (most importantly) own a business) to be able to throw around to get there way.
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
nine_k
There's a whole essay by N. Taleb analyzing this phenomenon: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
deknos
This all would be so much easier, if libraries could give out electronic books
deathanatos
… libraries can, and do, give out eBooks.
anon7000
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
TimorousBestie
My local library has stacks and stacks of steamy Christian romance and I’ve never once complained about them being a waste of money or space.
But the same library orders one copy of Heartstopper and all hell breaks loose.
ryandrake
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
apparent
Were any of these books in the kids' section? That could be one reason.
Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset — and quite possibly a small one — of the former group.
SchemaLoad
It's obvious. They probably don't even go to the library, they just want control over other people. They don't want other people reading books which could help them out, they want those people to go to church where they can be told they will burn in hell instead.
eloisius
[flagged]
seneca
I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
0x3444ac53
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
deathanatos
Do libraries carry Mein Kampf? Would the books you suggest be categorized and contextualized appropriately? (… like all other books, and a job that I believe librarians already perform.) "Categorized and contextualized appropriately" might also mean "not on the shelf / by request, but available for research"; a good many books that are considerably less objectionable and of greater literary value already are in libraries, as there is only so much shelf. Again, deciding what merits shelf space is a function of the librarian.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
[1]: https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
gblargg
Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials? (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
apparent
If it mirrors national trends, then some of both (but lots of the latter).
null
BrenBarn
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
evanjrowley
I love Front Royal. I'm also not surprised private equity tried to buy the library there. Money has been corrupting Northern Virginia for too long.
ssuds
Brendan Ballou’s book “Plunder” is an excellent read about the effects of private equity across industries, if you want to go deeper on the topic. I recently had him on my podcast talking about the effects of PE in HVAC. There are quirks in each realm but the themes are common (I guess in libraries, too).
Here’s that episode if any of you are curious: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/plunder-how-private-equity-is-r...
anon-3988
What is their business proposition here?
zx8080
Is there anything provided by the state for people and not for profit in the US?
windex
Billionaires buy elections, elected officials break funding for public facilities, billionaires get tax cuts, public facilities get bought out with tax cuts.
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Back to feudalism we go, election by election.
lexiciccone
[dead]
phendrenad2
[flagged]
benatkin
You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
phendrenad2
You're just getting confused by the article, it seems. Nowhere in the article does it make any specific claims about LS&S is "trying to get the transaction to happen", rather it makes vague begging-the-question claims that it's a "takeover attempt". It's probably a slick way to make people assume the conclusion was proved somehow, without actually doing it.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
> the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.