As an institution, the library comes close to being a gift economy in the realm of civic life. Although it’s not exactly a gift economy since it’s supplied by our tax dollars, an involuntary donation to the common good. But it has me wondering whether systems of sharing common public property might be analogues to gift economies. Libraries, parks, trails, and cultural landscapes we regard as public goods; they are what we call “common resources”—meant to be shared and cared for by the people who use them. They become possible when we pool our excess dollars in the form of taxes for the common
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