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.
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
