This article talks about various ways of protecting bookstores, with American versions being mostly ad hoc strategies that frequently fail and also fail to say: Bookstores are a public good and the public good has a price.

The anti-tax extremists have so commandeered the national conversation that we cannot admit aloud that there is a price to be paid (usually in the form of taxes) for the kind of society we truly want (in the broad strokes, Americans may sketch out a Randian dystopia, but once one drills down into the details, the picture is far more New Deal-esque).

Just to bring attention to a particular line in the article about the French law that helps secure the future of literary culture in France:

In Paris, the government started protecting indie bookstores back in the 1980s, a tacit admission that the corner bookshop—like a museum or a park—is a public amenity that transcends market value.

We have failed to properly explain how it is that something can ‘transcend market value.’ Though the right wing may have cornered the conversation of religious principles, it is the right wing’s rapacious economic arguments that have blinded us to the truth of things greater than monetary self-interest and bookstores are just one casualty.