I must vociferously protest Matt’s post about the post office. That he even wrote it shows how powerful repetition of talking points is—-the libertarian worship of Fed Ex and dismissing of the post office has been uncritically repeated so often it starts to make sense. But take a breath and think about how foolish libertarian philosophy is. It’s about creating a government so localized that the best living example of it is the fundamentalist, polygamist Mormons whose child rape compounds keep getting raided by the real government they refuse to recognize. In other words, we’re not talking theories that have been thought out as thoroughly as they should be.
Matt’s post starts off innocuously enough by entertaining the idea that reducing mail service from 6 days a week to 5 days a week might modernize the post office a bit and save money. If it would mean that I can use an entire book of stamps before the rate changes, I’d accept it, though I do like myself some Saturday delivery. What can I say? I like mail. It’s probably a leftover fetish from my ill-spent youth in a small town in West Texas where we didn’t have cable, our satellite dish was hard to operate and commandeered by my stepfather, we only had one crappy movie theater, and there was no music store to speak of, much less a decent bookstore. As such, catalogs and Entertainment Weekly (as well as Vogue, GQ, Sassy, etc.) were exciting forms of entertainment, and I would bicycle to the post office regularly to pick up the mail because I really wanted a new magazine to read. If only we had the internet then.
But it does highlight the value of the post office that pretty much 100% of all magazines use it for distribution. Which means that despite some nay-saying libertarian nonsense, the post office clearly is the best financial choice for many businesses. Despite the obviousness of this, Matt bites off some half-baked libertarian pseudo-theorizing.
When our country was founded, timely delivery of the mail was a critical piece of infrastructure and not something the private sector was ready to do. Modern conditions have led to the emergence of viable private sector parcel delivery firms, and have also led to a sharp decline in dependence on parcel delivery as a critical mode of communications. There’s the phone, fax, e-mail, etc along with UPS, DHL, FedEx, and the US Postal Service. The USPS is a useful entity in that mix, but modern-day conditions mean that postal policies don’t really matter in the way they once did.