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Well, I think you have to keep in mind that non-local PFL patrons are paying an annual membership fee, so it's not like they're not contributing in any way. And every little bit helps the library acquire more for its collection and maintain service, which sometimes the local taxpayer base may be a little lacking in, especially if it's budget cut season and the politicians want to score easy deductions while raising their own salaries again.
In my area, we've a province-wide e-lending system, rather than all the individual libraries each with their own. It pools a larger aggregate collection than any of the libraries (even the main metropolitan one) could field on their own, I think, and thus makes books accessible even to people living in tiny isolated mining towns up north across the board, instead of relegating them to second-class status like a lot of other provincial services tend to.
And some of the smaller municipal libraries take part in the Overdrive Enhanced program, which apparently nets those branches extra copies and/or extra titles, which can be a good way for places with greater local interest/available funding to "reward" their own patrons.
In my particular region, we've also got a reciprocal lending arrangement across the border with the nearest US county, so that US people from there can use one of our (more extensive) Canadian libraries and vice versa.
I think the future will reinvent the old-fashioned subscription library, where people pay a fee for access to materials directly desired by them rather than having it subsidized by public interest.
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