It boils down to the fact that we don’t want to be a city that forgives library fines. San Francisco, maybe, or Berkeley, but not here. When we meet our fellow citizen on the sidewalk and we look at each other squarely in the eye, we see a like-minded traveler who intends to get the book back on time.

Besides, we aren’t being truthful, or the mayor isn’t. That $2.5 million of accumulated late fees that he wants to forgive amounts to inventory that was basically stolen. And now, if there is no late fee or deadline or any other form of routine discipline, the St. Paul library shelves will be as stripped bare as a supermarket during a Florida hurricane watch.

A good friend and reliable source who happens to be in the property management business told me that he routinely, in the task of preparing an apartment for a new tenant, will find broken and discarded CD cases from the library.

“But no CDs,” he told me. “They’re in somebody’s car.”

Read the letters to the editor, Mayor Carter. Listen to the people, us, not the 12 or so department heads you have surrounded yourself with.

Back to the larger point. It’s a bit of an unnerving feeling, to be excused from such a basic and essential responsibility as getting a book back on time. We don’t want to be excused from that any more than we might wish to be excused from stopping at a stop sign or tithing at church. There are just certain elemental responsibilities that should be ingrained in the development of a larger social contract.

You went completely in the wrong direction on this, Mayor Carter, sent exactly the wrong message.

It makes us less rugged to be forgiven of such things. It makes us feel cheapened, even slovenly.

For many people, the first card they get in life is a library card. That’s the beginning that leads to a license, a credit card, the ID card that you ultimately need to get in and out of your building or workplace. It all starts with a library card, which forecasts a transaction that will forecast all transactions going forward, an agreement that in exchange for borrowing this particular book, you agree to return it on time.

That is the lesson we should be teaching children. If we forgive them this simple and rudimentary example of honest discipline, then how are they to be prepared for the larger stakes in life? House payments and rents have to be paid. Taxes have to be paid. Your license tabs have to be paid. Credit-card debt has to be paid.

In fact, if there really is a $2.5 million loss of inventory over however many years, then the librarians themselves will have to come up with some new ideas. I would never normally be approving of the government collecting more information about us than it already does, but maybe a borrower has to provide a telephone number in case a tardy youth needs a friendly reminder. I could come up with other ideas, but I am going to withhold them because I fear they would only cost the taxpayers more money.

Come on, mayor. Do the right thing. You claim to have been a patron of the library when you were a kid. Tell today’s kids not only how much you enjoyed the library, but how responsibly you returned your materials on time. Tell the kids of St. Paul that you don’t want to be the mayor of a city where the kids are let off the hook for such a basic agreement.

You went completely in the wrong direction on this, Mayor Carter, sent exactly the wrong message. Turn yourself around, not only for the kids, who need lessons in discipline, but for the sake of a city that needs to retain its sense of integrity.