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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Why Do We Allow Postal Monopoly to Continue?

Am I the only one in America pulling my hair out over the slow mail these days? Here we are: the mightiest, most efficient economy in the history of the world about to enter the 21st century still clinging to the 18th-century concept that the government should deliver the mail. This is the time of year when most of us start thinking a lot about the mail particularly getting Christmas cards out the door so they do not arrive embarrassingly sometime after New Year’s. The Postal Service is telling us to prepare for at least a week’s lag time for these first-class (now there’s a violation in truth in advertising) letters to get delivered on time. Where is the outrage, America? A week to deliver a letter. We’re headed toward a new millennium with mail delivery hardly faster than it was 200 years ago when it was delivered on horseback. We are supposed to be living in an electronic/communications age. Information is supposed to travel at the speed of light, not a casual stroll. Nickel stamps Mail delivery is one of the few communications services in America that has gotten consistently worse over time. Meanwhile, the speed of electronic messages has risen 1,000-fold over the past 20 years, and the cost has declined to almost zero. Not so with snail mail. As recently as the 1950s, mail was delivered twice a day and right to your door for a nickel. Nowadays, mail is dropped at mailboxes or “cluster boxes” that can be a long way from one’s doorstep, and they charge 33 cents per normal letter. On top of that, the Postal Service once again is agitating for a rate hike to 35 cents. Have you ever compared the speed of a Federal Express employee or, better yet, a Domino’s pizza delivery boy, with that of local letter carriers as they are now called? It’s like a race between Deion Sanders and Don Rickles. Hey, this gives me an idea. Perhaps we should contract out mail delivery to Domino’s. Here’s the motto: three days, or the letter is free. The explanation for the Postal Service’s lousy service is no great mystery. Our government long ago granted the USPS a legal monopoly. Our otherwise brilliant founding fathers thought postal delivery is an inherent function of government. Hence, there are now laws on the books called the Private Express Statutes designed to keep it that way. Now just whose interest does that law protect? Certainly not that of consumers. The Postal Service says it must have monopoly protection. USPS allegedly binds our nation together. Only USPS provides universal service to the nation at one uniform cost, or so legend has it. Sounds good, but in reality that has come to mean that we all get universally lousy service at a uniformly excessive cost. The justification for a postal monopoly is long gone. Instant communications It used to be that only the Postal Service would deliver to remote towns in Maine and North Dakota. But, nowadays, Federal Express and UPS will deliver to any address in the country. And even if you live isolated on an Alaska iceberg, as long as you have a computer and a telephone line, you can communicate instantly with a double-click. No one knows for sure how much monopoly mail milks from consumers every year, but the best guess is between $5 billion and $10 billion – as a result of higher costs and slower service. So the pro-consumer solution is as plain as the nose on the letter carrier’s face. Repeal the Private Express Statutes. Let everyone from Federal Express to the local Boy Scout troop deliver letters for any price they wish. (Several years ago, the Postal Service actually got a restraining order against a Boy Scouts troop that was delivering Christmas cards.) Competition surely will lower prices and speed delivery times. Imagine how fast you might get served at your local post office if the clerks knew that you could take your business next door if the men and women in blue kept offering the same slow and surly service. My bet is that if postal workers knew that their jobs depended on providing fast and friendly services, they would really move their tails and smile while doing it. Until that day (year, or God forbid, century) comes, I am no longer going to deal with the Postal Service. Anti-consumer monopoly This year I refuse to allow the Postal Service to ruin my holidays. You can now e-mail virtual Christmas cards, birthday wishes or Valentine kisses. The cards are wonderful. And you don’t have to allow for seven-day delivery. It’s closer to a seven-second delivery. How ironic that at the same time the U.S. government is harassing one of the great wealth-producing companies in history, Microsoft (which has been steadily lowering prices), the Postal Service’s constant call for higher prices goes unnoticed by Washington’s great trust busters. If Uncle Sam will not end America’s last anti-consumer monopoly where is Joel Klein and the Justice Department when we really need them? then perhaps technology will. Here’s to 1999 being the last year we have to put up with snail mail. Stephen Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute.

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