During the waning years of the Clinton administration, the Reno injustice department had the gall to sue Bill Gates' Microsoft Corporation, alleging that it had engaged in "monopolistic practices" and, hence, was committing a crime.
That's funny to me, because I believe that the way one of the nation's only genuine monopolies – the U.S. Postal Service – operates year after year ought to be a crime. The USPS, you know, has an absolute monopoly on the delivery of first-class letters and mail.
Consider:
One of Congress' duties is to ensure that "the mail gets through," but nowhere in the Constitution does it say that the nation's mail service provider has to be a federal agency. Officials will tell you the U.S. Postal Service is "private," but saying it is private and it actually being private are two different things. The Constitution supposedly provides us with "term limits" for congressmen, too (we can vote the bums out of office), but we all know how that works.
If the USPS has proven one thing over the past decade – which has been filled with frequent rate hikes and poor service horror stories – it is the fact as long as it remains a monopoly, it will never improve. When UPS, FedEx and Airborne Express began package delivery services, for example, only then did the USPS begin to feel compelled to compete for that part of the business.
But again, it took actual competitors in the private industry to force even those modest service improvements. I can only imagine how much better mail delivery would be if the entire "industry" was privatized.
USPS officials have complained that the reason why the agency is billions in debt is because of increased fuel costs and the bite e-mail takes out of regular letter delivery.
Well, I use e-mail much more than I have ever written actual letters (I like the convenience), so I'm betting most other Americans who are wired to the Internet are like that.
As regards the increased costs of operating large fleets of vehicles, jets and personnel – is the USPS saying that UPS, FedEx and the other shipping companies haven't had to encounter the same problems?
And yet they're profitable.
Congress can continue to allow the Postal Service to provide an expensive but lousy monopolistic product to the American people, or it can bust up this monopoly and "job it out" to private for-profit corporations that have every incentive to get the job done right, get it done efficiently, and get it done better than the next guy.
That's when Americans will finally get better mail service. Until then, we're going to have to pay nearly four bits for a half-cent stamp to a monopoly that has no reason to improve.
Related offer:
Think every vote counts? Think again. Get Jon E. Dougherty's report, "Election 2000: How the military vote was suppressed," in WorldNetDaily's online store.