Captive customers and the U.S. Post Office monopoly then and now.... - Granite Grok

Captive customers and the U.S. Post Office monopoly then and now….

I found myself in a post office yesterday. Gawd. I waited in line, and waited in line…and waited in line. The counter had

Oh please...how about ditch the monopoly.

one, and only one, postal employee at “work.” She chatted and talked and chatted and talked with the captive customer ahead of me. And I waited some more…I waited longer than I’ve ever waited in line in a Publix or any other grocery store. I waited longer than in any Wal-Mart I’ve ever been in. I waited longer for service than I’ve ever waited at any restaurant that I didn’t walk out of.

Why did I put up with that? Because the post office has a monopoly of course! Why not open it up to free market competition? Oh no! We couldn’t allow that! The private companies would “skim the cream.” Rural service would suffer! Mail would be too complicated!

Oh bosh. Like food? Like shoes? Don’t we need a monopoly government service to make sure that “rural areas” get enough food and shoes? To make sure that some stores don’t “skim the cream” on food and shoes? But I digress. The reason the post office has a monopoly is that it’s a bloated political  bureaucracy that has outlived its usefulness. You doubt me? Here’s what Thomas Jefferson had to say about the early post office:

“I view it as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post-office revenues; but other revenues will soon be called in to their aid and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their states; and they will always get most who are meanest.” (By using the word “meanest” here, Jefferson meant “inferior in character” or “corrupt and lacking in dignity,” not the “toughest badass.”)

Enter the American Letter Mail Company in 1844, founded by early abolitionist and individualist-anarchist, Lysander Spooner. Read all about Spooner and what the corrupt post office did to stomp out his fledgling competition HERE. As noted, his competition eventually led to a law passed in 1848 that gave a monopoly for first class mail to the government’s post office.

So it’s no wonder that I waited…and I waited…and I waited in line. In the meantime, in today’s Wall Street Journal we have the following headline on page 2: “Post Office Nears First Default in Its History.” But don’t worry, the August 1st payment owed by the post office is only $5.5 BILLION. And don’t worry, between April and June 2012 the postal service had a quarterly loss of only $3.2 BILLION. Result? Congress is on the job! They’re going to “reform” the postal service and they’re going to “restructure” it, and they’re going to make it “run like a business.” Blah, blah, blah.

We all know what should be done with a money-gushing dinosaur like the post office in a modern digital economy: Sell it off! That’s what Barry Goldwater might have suggested in his 1964 Presidential campaign, but any such privatization move meant all those earnest, right-thinking liberals were aghast! You can’t do that! It’s the…government’s post office!

Well, then…here we are, 48 years later. Everyone happy with it? (Besides, we’re going to need the money after the federal government goes bankrupt and causes the total collapse of the economy…but that’s another story.)

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