This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 5, 2012. I'm Kayla Brown.

This week is banned Books Week. As the Cato Institutes Neil McCluskey points out, banning books is almost inevitable when public schools must negotiate the diverse views of a wide variety of cultures.

McCluskey is author of feds in the classroom available at Cato.org.

It's natural and reasonable to recoil at the idea that we have public libraries, that we have

public school reading lists, and that there's some people say look this

book that book this writing is not acceptable and cannot be in your school library.

Can't be on your school reading list.

Of course, we're going to be upset by that

because it's somebody, you know, often somebody else

in our district, but maybe somebody we don't know,

trying to say, no, you can't't read that or you shouldn't read that

at least that's how we see it but the banned books problem goes much deeper than

that and this is something that the American Library Association and the other groups that really push banned books

week, which we've had for 30 years.

People don't know it all that well, but it's been for 30 years.

They don't tell you is, the problem starts as soon as some public entity be at a library

be the school library or be it a teacher on a putting on a reading list for their

class when they say here are books you should read

here are books we think we should buy and then they they they almost have no choice

they're other ones they have to exclude. So the real problem

starts at the very beginning when you have government decide what books are

okay for kids to read and then side other books are not okay to read. They're not okay to put in the library.

...