By Charlie Meyer:
Merry Christmas! It’s a safe time for my pal on the Right and I to discuss the perennial topic of privatization and the United States Postal Service.
Caveat: My son wears brown to work, matching the brown vans. They’re known for getting parcels to homes and businesses. They are also represented by the Teamsters. Now, the other guys, with forms of ‘express’ in their names, often involve a game of hide and seek in small towns such as Keyser, subject to a “three strikes” and the package goes back to the sender rule. Even if the package is held at the depot, at least Big Brown is twenty-odd miles north in Cumberland; the other guys might involve a couple hours’ drive over the mountains to Virginia, Outer Mongolia, or wherever the Stanford MBAs figured they could do it from most profitably for their corporate shareholders.
The Post Office is, and has long been, a fixture in cities and towns, large and small. More importantly, they have the “small town feel”; you get to know and appreciate the local human faces of our postal employees. When you send something certified or insured, the Post Office gets downright, but pleasantly, anal-retentive; always good when it’s your money. I can practically set my watch by my mail carrier. Unlike the barfly postal worker on “Cheers,” my letter carrier is out there doing his job. I’d wish he would stop inside for me to compliment the reliable good service we receive face to face. Stereotypes aside, I see our postal workers doing a fine job, an integral part of our community.
Unlike my conservative partner, who tends to be of the mindset that private enterprise does everything better, I believe there are certain functions best done by a government by and for the people. Could you imagine NAV-SPEC-WARDEVDRU, a special warfare outfit commonly called by it’s former name, SEAL Team SIX, answering the phone: “SEAL Team SIX, operated by the merry mercenaries of Blackwater, er, Xe, or whatever we call ourselves these days.” How about our Keyser Police Department, contracted to the rent-a-cops from Wackenhut, Inc.? Imagine if we skipped that new building, and contracted out the county 911 service to some big corporation who then offshores the service to a call center in India. (Actually, there was a humorous episode of the Comedy Central’s “Reno 911” cop show parody to demonstrate a 911 “offshoring” peril.) All in the name of corporate profits above all else.
No chance, Bucko! We’re not drinking the Kool-Aid, particularly after we saw the empty cyanide bottle in your corporate hand. There simply are things that a government, by and for the people should do.
The USPS is a public corporation; they work for us. We have avenues of redress should the Postal Service want to close or reduce Post Office hours and frequency, as we’re the “shareholders.” The private parcel services do serve as a competitive balance, and that’s a good thing. Should the private services want to “redline” and reduce services and locations around here, we really don’t have a say in it. I used to be able to talk face to face and pay my bill with the cable television company on Main Street. That office has been closed for a while. Nobody asked me if I minded. We are fortunate to have postal service not run by Wall Street.
I hit puberty around the last time the postal unions went on strike...and all that AARP junk mail reminds me that was way more than a few decades ago. Speaking of childhood memories, remember when folks would leave cookies for the letter carrier this time of the year? While Santa hasn’t been leaving bills under the tree, he far outweighs my fit letter carrier and his van. Combined. Unlike my reliable “rain, snow, gloom-of-night” mailman, Santa only comes but once a year. Is Ole St. Nick hiding in the back row at Curves the rest of the year?
Remember the television news story on CNN about excesses in the Postal Service’s relocation practices? I really don’t think that Lisa, the always friendly woman on the other side of the counter at the Post Office, is thinking of moving because the Postal brass in D.C. offered her a million bucks for her house. (I’m joking!) Gaffes aside, the Postal Service, as a public corporation, balances the commercial practices of a corporation with the transparency and accountability of a government entity. Try that with the banks, who complained about government regulation, then were bailed out by taxpayers, only to be miffed by public outrage over fat executive bonuses. I’m sure those Wall Street execs are worth it. Riiiggghhhttt.....as Dr. Evil used to say.
In the adage of “If it isn’t broke...”, I remain entirely satisfied with the United States Postal Service. It’s a vital part of towns large and small, routinely doing an exceptional job. Inexpensive, responsive, and accountable to its’ owners: all of us. It has a global reach, but with a friendly, familiar, local face. Unlike Adam “The Grinch” Smith and his mob of F-word News Channel “Hidden Hand” Grinchettes, the Postal Service generally isn’t delivering lumps of coal, except for the varnished lump of coal I received one Christmas way back in the Sixties. That, as I recall, came Parcel Post from the coalfields of Logan County. Once.
I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season, celebrating in the company of family and friends. Rest assured, though, if your gift giver sent the present Express Mail at the last minute, there will be a postal worker delivering it to your door on Christmas.
By Stephen Smoot:
It’s almost an unwritten law that when one mentions the post office and socialism in the same breath that a conservative or libertarian writer has to bring up the ill-chosen words of Vladimir Lenin concerning both. The first leader of Soviet Russia famously declared “To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service so that the technicians, foremen and accountants, as well as all officials, shall receive salaries no higher than ‘a workman's wage’, all under the control and leadership of the armed proletariat--that is our immediate aim. This is what will bring about the abolition of parliamentarism (Lenin’s word for representative democracy.)”
The post office actually does perform its basic task effectively. Just speaking anecdotally, I can say it has been very rare that the post office has not gotten me my mail in a timely manner. The mailman comes at the same time every day. Clerks at the Keyser branch have always waited on me with courtesy. However, this comes at a much more staggering cost than most people might imagine. In short, the operation of the United States Postal Service is unsustainable by any economic standard.
Last year between January and August, the Postal Service lost $4.7 billion. That’s with a “b.” In October alone it lost $209 million. Why? Consider the changes over the last thirty years. Long distance telephone charges dropped like a stone in a pond after the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s. At one point people only made long distance calls in a dire emergency or if they had loads of money to shell out to Ma Bell. Then came e mail, cheap fax transmissions, and other faster, cheaper replacements for a mailed letter. Many people even handle their utility and other payments electronically, ending the need for bills sent through the mail. They also receive checks through direct deposit. An increasingly paperless society requires less actual delivery of mail. Tradition still demands that people send each other Christmas cards and job rejection notices in the customary manner, but for the most part the old bread and butter of postal revenue has dried up.
The Postal Service also has an additional issue. It runs with extreme inefficiency, wasting millions of dollars on shocking purchases. In 2008, an internal investigation uncovered a single Postal Service conference cost the taxpayers over $355,000. One single dinner for 650 attendees cost over $62,000. This represents just one example of how the Postal Service wastes our money and does not have to face the same accountability as other parts of the private sector.
I am guessing that my worthy adversary will cite the Constitution’s mandate that the Congress has the authority to establish Post Offices and post roads. Does this literally mean that the government must directly control the postal service and continue wasting taxpayer money? Its own actions answer that question. Today many of the packages that you drop off to the Post Office get shipped by United Parcel Service. In this area it found that private enterprise functioned more effectively than the government-run service. With this point established, should we not privatize and bid out all Postal Service functions? Congress can set standards, the President can enforce postal laws, but the functions get carried out by the private sector. If they screw up, they get replaced. Most likely the country would have a group of regional or state carriers along with independent contractors for rural areas. Daily delivery would fade into history, but that will happen anyway. Af! ter all UPS and FedEx proved that the private sector can handle package delivery and turn a profit, why couldn’t they or other businesses handle the mail service?
Getting back to Lenin’s statement, America is currently watching its government encroach ever farther into the national economy, trying to take over entire sectors while regulating others more and more out of existence. All the while they prove Lenin’s point about running the national economy like the Post Office. Currently the national debt owed by US taxpayers to countless holders, including foreign powers such as Communist China, tops $12 trillion. Our total public debt is 141% of all goods and services created in the United States (GDP.) Health care deform, cap and trade, and thousands of other left wing ideas to spend your money have made every single individual American owe $39,000. Lenin’s idea has triumphed. We do run our government and economy just like the Post Office. And all of us will suffer when the bills come due which happens to everyone, including government. The time has come to reorient our priorities, privatize as many government functions! as is feasible, cut spending on the rest. If not, this system will surely collapse. Privatizing the Postal Service should be part of a massive first step away from socialism and control back to a real free market economy that can prosper.
These issues are very important because they affect all of us. This week I do want to take time out for something even more crucial. We celebrate the birth of Jesus this week. We Christians think about the immaculate conception and birth of the Son of God. We consider the gift of grace granted to this Earth of Christ and also what He and His Church mean to all of us. He came to teach, save, and redeem us from evil and ultimately ourselves. Non Christians can consider the impact of the
historical man and his ideas that you may do good things, but you must also have a good heart. Christ’s ideals form much of the foundation of how we believe we should relate to each other, even if people always fall short.
Finally I want to wish my counterpart a wonderful Christmas. You all out there don’t get to read how much fun we have sometimes going back and forth with e mails. We’ve been blessed with an opportunity to hash out important issues in the spirit I believe the founder of Christmas would have intended, honestly and vigorously, but also in the spirit of respect. We are also blessed to live in this wonderful town and I wish you all a wonderful and safe Christmas and a prosperous New Year.
