-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.1/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.1/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 1</A> The Laissez Faire City Times January 4, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 1 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ----- Going Postal--Again! by Don L. Tiggre On January 10, 1999, the United States Postal Service will do it again: torque up the prices on their most-heavily-relied-upon services. The press release from the post office gives the impression the USPS bends over backwards to show how reasonable and necessary the increases are, but ignores the fact that if there ever had been a reasonable claim offered why governments should run postal services, that claim's last remnant of credibility died with the advent of electronic data transmission. The post office's press release says: "First Class letters weighing one ounce will go up one penny, to 33 cents, while postage for the second ounce will go down a penny to 22 cents, keeping the price of a two-ounce letter at 55 cents. The cost of mailing a three-ounce letter will actually be reduced a penny, to 77 cents from 78." But the First Class one-ounce letter is the USPS cash cow, so the penny reduction in three-ounce letter postage is little more than throwing the dog a bone, after all the meat has been chewed off. The rate for the popular two-pound Priority Mail envelope will increase 20 cents to $3.20 and the half-pound Express Mail overnight delivery rate will go up a dollar, to $11.75. The release adds: "The average increase across all classes of mail is 2.9 percent-the lowest rate increase ever." Perhaps so, but it's still an increase, and the government does not allow competition to determine if the prices are reasonable in the first place, let alone whether or not they need to increase. Consider the tone of the excuse to post office offers for jacking up its prices: "The new rates also include new product features, such as bulk insurance and package discounts. Another feature, delivery confirmation for Priority Mail and Parcel Post shipments, will be available in late spring 1999.. The rate increase is just enough to fund further Postal Service investments in buildings, vehicles, and equipment and to ensure that mail service continues to improve." Clearly sensitive to angry reactions among postal patrons, the post office tells us that the money will be used to pay for expenditures which competitive businesses bear all the time--just to stay in the market place. Faced with stiff competition, many businesses make such improvements in plant, equipment, and increased services, while reducing prices. Besides, if, as they claim, they really need cash to cover operating expenses, why don't they just use the funds currently spent on expensive advertisements like their Olympic sponsorships? They are a monopoly providing a service that is in great demand; they'll get their business without wasting money on advertising. The inescapable truth for post office officials in this country, as well as others, is that as long as they enjoy a government-enforced monopoly, there is no way to evaluate their services. There is no way to know if the prices are fair, since there is no freedom for the prices to fluctuate in a competitive market place. There is no way to know--but every reason to doubt--whether price increases are actually necessary to cover the costs of doing business, because coercively enforced monopolies are essentially not businesses. So, as we start a new year and approach a new millennium, wading deeper into the Information Age, it is time to ask again why postal monopolies still exist. Morally, of course, nothing has changed since Lysander Spooner's day. The existence of any state-run enterprise, let alone a state-run monopoly, does violence to honest business people and abuses the supposedly sanctioned powers of just government. That aside, the practical objections to postal monopolies are as valid as ever. Here in the U.S., the postal service claims to be more business-like. They describe themselves as a "quasi-governmental" agency and say they are nothing like the old post office which received direct government subsidies, pre-1970. They say that since they have to make all their money serving the people who step up to the counter or leave mail in a mail box, they are much more customer-oriented. It says so, right there in their manuals. However, as anyone who lives in the U.S. can testify, going to the post office is anything but like going to a real business. The appearance of mission statements, five-minute guarantees and rhetoric about heeding three "voices" (the customer's, the employee's, and that of the business) has not really made the USPS customer- oriented. For example, a recently mailed book package was returned tattered and torn. The book was intact, so the customer didn't complain. Then a second book was returned, and the package looked like it had been through a war zone. One edge was torn open and a rubber band had been placed around it to keep the book inside. Somehow, they managed to go on to rip the package in half, which they repaired with scotch tape and more rubber bands. The customer knew it was futile, but just had to say something and went down to his local post office and showed the remains of his package to the sweet old lady behind the counter. She was appropriately horrified and assured her customer that she would tell someone. Asked if it would do any good, she just shrugged and suggested that the customer use sturdier packaging the next time. This is the kind of response one would expect from a powerless employee working in an impersonal bureaucracy, not a caring employee empowered by the profit motive. Is it any wonder that this bloated monopoly-- with its stranglehold on more business in a week than the United Parcel Service handles in a year--is the home of that peculiar expression of frustration known as "going postal"? In researching this story, I asked some questions at the local post office about their "business." I asked only simple things, such as how many pieces of mail their "business" handles per year, what their revenue/sales figures were, the number of employees they had, and the estimated value of their property, plant, and equipment. No one there could answer my questions. So I took my questions to the big postal center in Salt Lake City. Three bored-sounding employees were also unable to answer and passed my call on to someone else. None of them even knew of a way I could contact the Post Master General's office in Washington for information. The final postal "service" employee I reached "served" me by asking me to call back later and speak with his supervisor, who had left early for the holiday. Not only is this definitely not businesslike, but it's a natural result of the monopoly the post office enjoys by force of law. Since for many essential "services" the "customers" cannot take their business elsewhere, every such "sale" the post office makes is, in fact, subsidized. The quasi-privatization of the U.S. post office in 1970 was really nothing more than smoke and mirrors; the bureaucracy endures. And it endures despite the fact that the reason the bureaucracy was created in the first place no longer holds true. Postal services are one of the few business-like endeavors the U.S. government engages in that are expressly mandated in the U.S. Constitution. The reason for this was that the founders of the country deemed the existence of postal couriers between individuals, communities, and governments to be absolutely essential--so important as to justify the use of government force. This is clearly not the case today, when people have access to e-mail, fax machines, and other private means of getting important information and documentation from point to point more reliably and with greater security than post offices will ever manage. If it is truly important, people use FedEx or similar courier services. The post office's assurances can't hold a candle to their private competitors' guarantees and everyone knows it. So why haven't things changed? To a degree, we can certainly blame the postal service itself, which has lobbied heavily over the years to keep its monopoly status. It is not only the faceless collective that is to blame: individual postal employees and their postal workers union have considerable political clout, which they have shamelessly used to the public detriment year after year. But the main portion of blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the people who have come to believe that there is no changing the post office. There isn't, and can't be, a country in the world where postal workers are a majority. The rest of us complain, but we let them get away with their government-protected racket. Granted, there are often other pressing issues when we engage in political action, but if we neglect to make the privatization of postal services a priority in our political campaigns, what business have we pointing fingers? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don L. Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 1, Jan. 4, 1998 ----- The Laissez Faire City Times is a private newspaper. Although it is published by a corporation domiciled within the sovereign domain of Laissez Faire City, it is not an "official organ" of the city or its founding trust. Just as the New York Times is unaffiliated with the city of New York, the City Times is only one of what may be several news publications located in, or domiciled at, Laissez Faire City proper. For information about LFC, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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