I think this should apply to most essential services (and libgen absolutely is an essential service; others are E2EE messaging and E2EE cloud-hosting). After all, people like to imagine (and are often told) that taxes are not a ransom you pay to the ruling oligarchy, but almost a donation you almost willingly give away for the sake of maintaining public infrastructure.

But the key words are "a better world". I don't think this is really possible in, uh, this world. Imagining a world like that is a bit like a soviet utopian-fantasy book about the world of established communism. "Sounds Good, Doesn't Work".

To be fair, though, if "the government" you are talking about is the one of the USA, I thinks loc.gov is pretty great stuff. I mean, it's pretty shit compared to what somebody like "the Anna" could do with this amount of resources, and it isn't really made in a way to make researching, copying and saving stuff locally easy, but still, I'd love if every country maintained something like that (at least). Lots of relatively rare interesting stuff out there.