Time to Eliminate the Postal Service?

TruthNews Commentary, November 23, 2001

The same outfit that brought us the Unabomber and the expression "went postal" has now brought us the anthrax scare. No, we’re not talking about the Union of Crazed Killers, but rather America’s largest civilian bureaucracy, the Postal Service. After killing 5 Americans with poisoned letters, the Postal Service is now busily trying to clean up its mail so it will no longer be an accomplice to murder. Here in Washington, the mail delivery has slowed to a trickle. We’ve hardly noticed, although we’re not contributing near as much junk mail to the local landfill as we once did. Presumably the Postal Service is doing that for us, although we’re still waiting for a Postal Service dump truck to come to our house some day and dump a huge pile of Publisher’s Clearing House envelopes on our front lawn. We could then set fire to it and invite the neighbors for a weenie roast, although they’ll probably be busy burning their own junk mail. Of course, detoxifying the mail isn’t free. Within the next few months, we should expect the Postal Service to present a bill to Congress that will make the airline bailout seem like peanuts by comparison. Either that, or the Board of Governors will vote to raise the cost of mail to $35 per letter instead of the current 35 cents.

All of this raises the question, Why Do We Need the Postal Service? With today’s e-mail, using the Postal Service to deliver letters has become an anachronism. Even before the anthrax scare, the mail in Washington was taking over two weeks just to get across town. Businesses have long since learned to use Federal Express for mail that needs rapid delivery. Today, most people are afraid to open their mail anyway and are throwing it away instead of opening it. For packages, United Parcel Service and its lesser known competitors have long been outdoing the Postal Service, both with speed of delivery and price. With electronic bank transfers, we don’t need the Postal Service for paying bills.

So, why not shut down the Postal Service? True, printed magazines may lose out, but web-based media outlets like TruthNews are there to pick up the slack. The only real losers will be the outfits like Publisher’s Clearing House who will no longer have a taxpayer-subsidized delivery system for their mountains of junk mail. Maybe they could rent dump trucks instead. Or better yet, they could print it and send it directly to the landfill. This would increase efficiency by eliminating the middleman (us).

Shutting down the Postal Service would have the added benefit of not only virtually eliminating the mountains of junk mail and thereby saving many young trees, but it will also end the federal government’s practice of shaking down Boy Scouts who innocently place fliers in mail boxes on people’s doors. The monopolistic government behemoth claims that these mail boxes belong to the Postal Service and therefore can only be used for the delivery of Postal Service mail. Funny thing, I don’t remember the Postal Service paying for my mail box.

The Postal Service wasn’t always the tool of big business and persecutor of little boys. Before 1970, the Postal Service was the Post Office Department. During the years up to 1970, Post Office customers saw steady expansion of service and increasingly rapid delivery of the mail. In 1969, however, President Richard ("I am not a crook") Nixon proposed a plan to substantially privatize the Post Office. Astonishingly, Congress went along with this hare-brained scheme, and the name of the Post Office was changed to the U.S. Postal Service. Before 1970, the Post Office had always been a service to the people, but once the word "service" was incorporated into its name, it ceased being a service. The postal workers went on strike, costs spiraled out of control, and a first class stamp skyrocketed in price from 6 cents to 35 cents. Nixon was later forced to resign under threat of impeachment, but the Postal Service remained a quasi-independent agency, subsidized by Your Tax Dollars, but answerable to no one. This led to the ludicrous situation in the early 1990s in which the Postal Service Board of Governors sued the Postal Rate Commission because the Rate Commission did not authorize as high a rate increase as requested by the Postal Service (the Rate Commission lost).

But won’t shutting down the Postal Service throw a million people out of work and wreck the American economy? Not at all. You see, Congress has just voted to federalize the security workforce at airports. We’ll just put the fired postal workers to work guarding the airports. Postal Service workers have proven themselves adept in the use of firearms, and in comparison to fighting off a rabid dog, subduing a rabid terrorist would probably seem easy. Besides, the postal workers already have uniforms. Since, according to the news media, 90 percent of the current airport security workers appear to be illegal aliens with prior felony convictions, this will have the advantage of replacing the illegal aliens with people who are already federal employees and therefore guaranteed to be true blue American citizens.

So maybe we should eliminate the Postal Service. Either that, or put it back under control of the federal government, which is what the Constitution requires in the first place.

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