At 8:30 AM -0700 8/2/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>>The reason there's a postal monopoly is in large part because of an
>>anarchist lawyer, Lysander Spooner, who believed that private business
>>could do a much better job of anything that a government business,
>>and demonstrated it by running a better postal service in Rochester New York
>>than the US Snail could, in about the 1840s. They couldn't beat him
>>at their own game, so they banned him from competing.
>
>
>That's oversimplifying things a bit. Part of the Postal Service's
>traditional mandate is to provide mail delivery *at the same price*
>for everybody. It's completely unsurprising that they can be
>undercut in Urban markets where the deliveries are mainly short
>and the carriers are very efficient because they can pick up or
>drop off hundreds of items per hour.
Fine, let them provide "universal service"--but this has nothing to
do with using force to bar other delivery services!
It does in the sense that the other services can cherry pick the
higher-paying clients, can concentrate on high-volume, higher-profit
markets. However, the USPS does the same kind of "cross-subsidizing"
by charging 33 cents to mail a letter of trivial weight while
enticing corporate customers to sign up for subsidized bulk rates.
The solution to all of these cross subsidies is to let free and
unfettered competition happen.
Package delivery services are under no compulsion to deliver to the
most remote of locations. They do, usually. Some rural areas have a
surcharge to cover the remoteness, and delivery may take an extra day
or two. (My area, for example, may soon be on the UPS "every other
day" program, where the UPS driver makes the circuit every other day
instead of every day. Sounds fair to me, even though I don't like it.)
I have no doubt but that some service would pick up the slack and
deliver to remote locations. Granted, if someone lives up at the top
of a dirt road in the middle of the Kayoot National Forest, delivery
may be tough. But, importantly for this example, the US Postal
Service probably won't deliver to such an address, either. This is
why many rural residents get their mail in town, at mailboxes, or
other means of Rural Delivery.
--Tim May
>
>But Spooner's service (and so far every mail service ever proposed
>by a private-enterprise) refused to serve rural customers, because
>out there it takes more resources to get from A to B, and the
>carrier may spend hours just going to get or deliver one letter.
>
>The legal justification for shutting Spooner's mail service down
>was that by refusing to serve rural customers, he'd be taking
>the profitable markets away from the post office and therefore
>driving costs out of reach for rural customers. The alternative
>to shutting down his service would have been tripling or quintupling
>postage costs for rural delivery, and the feds weren't ready to do
>that.
>
>Of course, there's a valid argument that if someone wants to live
>ten miles from the end of the nearest road (like my bud Dimu, an
>american Indian living on federal land), then paying some postal-
>packing person to spend the necessary six hours walking along
>game trails to deliver his weekly bag of junk mail should be a
>fact of life for junk mailers. But the feds identified a national
>interest in having everybody pay the same rate, and that is why
>Spooner's service was shut down.
>
>Worthy of note: having mail everywhere be the same rate means that
>your cross-town deliveries are paying, in part, for the letters I
>send to Dimu and for contracting companies in alaska mailing
>pallets of cinder-blocks to construction sites up in the back of
>beyond -- it's the cheapest method for freight delivery.
>
>Also worthy of note: If you're willing to serve *EVERYBODY* at
>the same postage rate, the federal argument against having private
>competition against the USPS won't hold up in court against you.
>
> Bear
--
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Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
