I have a subscription to my hometown newspaper, The Glastonbury Citizen. At least, I’m supposed to. Over half the issues published since school started did not arrive in my mailbox, and the ones that did always arrived weeks late.
It seemed the Citizen was messing up, so I emailed the publisher. His response? “It’s the post office….Once the post office has them, we have no control.” He added, “Out-of-town deliveries are a nightmare – sometimes two months late. The bottleneck appears to be in Hartford. We’ve complained and complained, but the post office doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in the problem.”
This is evidence that the United States needs to privatize the Postal Service.
What does that mean, exactly? Let’s compare the system for snail mail with e-mail. With e-mail, you can use Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Cox, SNET or, if you’re really desperate, HuskyMail. You use whichever one you like best, and if you’re disappointed, you can always switch.
Not so with postal mail. Ever since Congress passed the Postal Reorganization Act in 1970, the Postal Service has had an official monopoly on mail delivery. Sure, there’s FedEx and UPS, but they specialize in packages, not routine mail, so they’re allowed. In other words, if you don’t like the Postal Service, or they do a bad job, there’s nothing you can switch to. It’s against the law for a competing company to even exist.
Guess which president signed the Postal Reorganization Act into law? Richard Nixon. So it must be good.
But some maintain that the Postal Service should remain a monopoly. As one person argued: “The Postal Service needs increased flexibility to examine how it can be increasingly responsive in serving Americans into the future as circumstances continue to change. A more rigidly defined universal service obligation would unduly restrict the Postal Service and ultimately harm the American public and businesses it serves.”
Who wrote that? Postmaster General John Potter, head of the Postal Service. What a surprise. The man wants to keep his job.
Guess how much money the Postal Service made in 2008? Actually, it lost $2.8 billion. But at least they realized they were underperforming and turned themselves around, right? Nope. In 2009, they lost $3.794 billion.
If the Postal Service was privatized, that would mean mail delivery would be run by private companies. It would operate similarly to how companies like Google or Yahoo run e-mail. For proof that this would work better, imagine if government ran e-mail. Good luck trying to send a message on Sundays.
England realizes this. Last week, the U.K. government proposed a bill which, if passed, will privatize its mail service. As The Wall Street Journal reports: “Several governments have backed away from privatizing the postal service in the past, fearing a public backlash, and labor unions are likely to threaten strikes in protest at a time when the government is facing wider union unrest due to public-spending cuts. The government maintains that only privatization will provide new funds to complete the modernization of the service and reduce the burden on the taxpayer.”
Does President Obama plan something similar? As The Washington Post reports, “It’s just the opposite…the President will help the Postal Service retain their monopoly and weather the current economy. The White House supports the House and Senate measures designed to provide short-term relief to the Postal Service and plans to work with lawmakers on long-term solutions.” Great.
All I know is that I have not received half the issues of The Glastonbury Citizen, and the ones I have received came weeks late. It’s not the newspaper’s fault. It’s not UConn’s fault. It’s the Postal Service’s fault.
A few weeks ago, Blockbuster Video declared bankruptcy, because Netflix came along and provided better service. But as long as the Postal Service remains the only organization allowed to deliver mail, they will never change. Why would they? Privatization encourages efficiency in a way that a governmental monopoly does not.