Let Anyone Deliver the Mail; L.E. Read

2) Themail is slower than it was before World War II. 3) A letter often takes 48 hours to travel 100 miles. 4) The Post Office is floundering in a sea of mail that gets deeper every year. 5) The Post Office is spending two million dollars a day more than it receives in revenue. ALMOST all proposals for solving this generallyacknowl edged bureaucratic failure are predicated on govern ment's remaining in the mail business.this premise being no more questioned than government's running the con stabulary. Proposed solutions range all the way from getting a new Postmaster General to appropriating mil lions of dollars for research, all aimed at making a gov ernment business efficient. 1 Langewiesche, Wolfgang. cCOur Horse and Buggy Mails." Reader's Digest 70:37-44. May 1957. Mr. Read is President of the Foundation for Economic Education. [390 ] The reason that· most people assume mail delivery to be a proper function of government is not difficult to find. At our nation's outset, the most respected of Amer ican political instruments, The Constitution of the U.S.A., proclaimed: ~~The Congress shall have power . . . to es tablish Post Offices. . . ."2 The Congress exercised this power. There are now 38,316 Post Offices.3 But 'Congress went further than the permissibility granted by the Constitution. Congress outlawed competi tion. Congress declared mail delivery a government mo nopoly. No one, today, may carry mail for pay except on a subcontract arrangement with Uncle Sam. Mail is the government's business-period!

When ariy activity has been monopolized for years, persons with entrepreneurial aptitudes rarely think of it as an opportunity for private enterprise. A field monopo lized by government soon becomes both an ~~untouch able" and an «unthinkable." Thus, everyone-almost presumes it proper that government be in the mail busi ness. Disconcerting Questions Almost! Now and then, however, there are individuals who question the generally accepted premise. Their rea soning goes something like this: Don't we deliver more pounds of milk every morning than we do mail? Isn't milk more perishable than a love letter or a catalogue or an appeal for funds or a picture magazine or an enter2 Article I, Section 8. S Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1956. Page 518. [391 ] tainment journal? Isn't milk delivery more prompt, more efficient, lower priced than mail delivery? Why shouldn't men in the market place-acting privately, competitively, voluntarily, cooperatively-deliver mail? They deliver freight, which is heavier.

What causes people to conclude that the type of enter prisers who get gas out of the earth in Texas and pipe it to millions of homes in far off states can't deliver mail? Men freely and voluntarily organized in the market place have found ways to send the human voice around the world in less than a second. They have built winged things that will transport more than a hundred human beings from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours. And, they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Atlantic Seaboard-halfway around the world-for less than the fee to get a one-ounce, first class letter delivered from Irvington to adjacent Tarry town. While this last comparison has elements of unfairness in it, this example of free market oil delivery, on a weight-distance-time basis, wins against this ex ample of mail delivery by more than 10,000 to 11 Government's Best Now let's load a comparison heavily in favor of gov ernment mail delivery. The fastest mail service is an airmail letter. With the best of luck a letter posted in Irvington at 5:00 p.m. could be in the hands of an addressee in Los Angeles 40 hours later, and for six cents. Now, consider the incomparably more complex [392 ] problems of a personal conversation with the same An gelino. He can be reached and a three-minute talk-fest completed in four minutes, and for $3.50 (less the gov ernment excise tax). On a time-cost basis the fee for the government letter is 870 per cent more than the fee for the private enterprise conversation!

Why do any of us, in the light of overwhelming evi dence on every hand, cling to the notion that a letter can be delivered only by a governmental agency? Instead, we should marvel that people in government are able to deliver the mail at all; not because they are untalented, but simply because of the manner in which they are organized to do the job. WhatW ould You Do? Suppose you were asked to head a business-one of the largest in the world-one in which you were wholly in experienced and to which you had given no thought. Next, assume that a substantial part of your key per sonnel had to be selected on the basis of political pre ferment. And, finally, imagine that the income of the business depended not on willing exchanges in a free market but on appropriations made to your business by two directorates, of 96 and 435 members respectively, all being unlike-minded individuals with their own po litical fortunes more in mind than the business you have been given the responsibility of running. With responsi bility and authority so completely unrelated, and with the other aforementioned conditions as obstacles, what [393 ] kind of a performance do you think you could turn in?

And, consider this supposition. Suppose, a century ago, that the Post Office-headed, manned, and organ ized as above-had been given a monopoly of all trans portation and all communication. What, today, would be the shape of trains, trucks, planes, telephones, wireless? Is there any reason to believe that there would have been any progress in these technologies? C'lt [the Post Office] uses the same methods of gathering, sorting, and deliver ing the mail that it did 100 years ago." What reason is there to suspect that all transportation and all communi cation wouldn't be at the same stage as 100 years ago? The fact that the Constitution empowered Congress to put the government in the postal business does not make it right. The same Constitution condoned slavery. Nor is government postal service justified by the danger ous and popular notion that government should do for the people that which they cannot or will not do for themselves. If this were a sound rule, then anything the government ever attempted would become a proper gov ernment function simply because most people· give up realizing the futility of trying to compete with the tax collector.

The Difference Is Force To decide for one's self what government should and should not do, it is only necessary to appreciate how persons in government diller from themselves when not in government. Government is society's agency of force [394 ] and the persons in its employ are a part of the com pulsive apparatus. Omit force and each government em ployee is restored to private status. Without force, there is no distinction. If force is the only distinguishing characteristic of those in government, then we should examine into the nature of force to determine for ourselves what govern ment should and should not do. Thus, we should ask, what is the nature of coercive force? What accomplish ment is peculiar to it? Coercive force can be symbolized by the fist, the policeman's club, the gun. What can a gun do? It can penalize. It can inhibit. It can destroy. The next relevant question is, what ought to be penalized, inhibited, de stroyed? In terms of man's relationship to man, violence certainly qualifies. So does fraud, misrepresentation, and predatory practice. Coercive force, then, may properly be employed to penalize, inhibit, and destroy violence, fraud, misrepresentation, and predation.

Or, examine "where to draw the line" between gov ernment and free market operations by the moral ap proach: Man's energies are manifested destructively and creatively. Any person has a moral right to inhibit the destructive action of another aimed at himself. But no person has a moral right to forcibly direct or control what another shall create, invent, or discover, where he shall work, how long he shall labor, what his wage shall be, or what and with whom he shall exchange. No one per son has such a right. Nor do 170,000,000persons, or any of their agents, have such a right. [395 ] The Duty of Government Government, in good theory, and on moral grounds, has a right to inhibit the destructive actions of anyone menacing our society. Government has no grounds for forcibly directing or controlling the creative actions of anyone. Delivering mail qualifies as a creative activity just as does delivering milk or any other form of communication and transportation. The proper part for government, in relation. to this activity, is to protect honest enterprise against violence, fraud, misrepresentation, predation. In earlier history the sheriff and other parts of the con stabulary tried to protect the Wells Fargo Express against highwaymen. Private enterprise carried the mails; gov ernment protected the enterprise. That was at once the theoretically sound and practical relationship of the two.

Force Maintains I nefJiciency Government establishments are ill-suited to perform a creative function. They are improperly organized for that. They can, however, use coercive force, which they are now doing with respect to the postal business in these two ways: 1. Force is used to keep private enterprise from carry ing the mails, to maintain government's monopoly. Try delivering mail for pay and see what happens. 2. Force is used to collect the deficits which the gov ernment monopoly incurs. Try not paying your taxes if you wish to experience the force. [396 ] Deficits are incurred for numerous reasons. One, of course, is because mail delivery, a creative enterprise, requires, for efficiency, the organization of men along voluntary, competitive lines; and the very nature of gov ernment organization forbids this. Inefficiency is inevi table. Government ownership and control of the means of production is socialism. The socialistic principle requires the communalization or communizing of the product. We observe this when those who are expensive to serve are charged the same rate as those who are inexpensive to serve. There isn't any more reason for subsidizing mail delivery to a person far away from the Post Office than for subsidizing clothing delivery to such a person.

Think of an idea more preposterous than this: The textile manufacturers, for example, are to organize them selves into a pressure group with the sole purpose of forcing cotton farmers to sell their cotton to them at one tenth the price they can obtain in the market 1 Crazy? Yes, as unjust as trying to force you to labor for them for free. Yet, this type of plunder, impossible in a free market, is precisely what happens when government is in the mail business. The personnel of the postal establish ment are powerless against such special privilege, for they receive their running orders-rate structure and other detailed specifications-from a political directorate that bends to pressure groups. The Post Office is a branch of a political, not an economic, organization. There are, indeed, reasons' for deficits. Illustrations? Well, if The Freeman were sold on a [397 ] straight subscription basis, we could send it to you under a Second Class Mail Permit for as little as one-fourth of a cent per copy. But as a ':':controlledcirculation" publi cation (not all paid subscribers), the postage runs as much as 600 per cent more per copy. Prosperous maga zines, with circulation in the millions, hold Second Class Permits, with delivery at least as punctual as for first class mail.

In good American political theory the government has no right to use taxpayers' money to prolong the life of a failing enterprise. Nor is there any justification for pour ing millions of taxpayers' dollars into the coffers of suc cessful publishing corporations. There is no reason why taxpayers should be compelled to subsidize the delivery of The Freeman or The Daily Worker or anything that lies between these ideological opposites. There is no more reason for tax subsidized delivery of any book or magazine or newspaper or catalogue than there is for subsidized delivery of corn Hakes. Why is it done? Simply because mail delivery is handled by a political establish ment which is incapable of resisting political pressure. Simple Solution The solution is simple enough, and consists of two moves: 1. Let the Congress repeal the monopoly now granted to the government, thus permitting anyone to deliver mail for pay who wishes to do so, as unrestricted as milk or grocery delivery.

[398 ] 2. Let the Congress appropriate no more money to the Treasury for Post Office Department use and insist that the accounting be on a basis comparable to private enter prise accounting, to include rentals, taxes, and so on, thus requiring the Post Office Department to charge rates that will incur no deficits.4 If the above conditions are adopted, government operation of the mails will soon be a thing of the past. Beyond this I can no more make predictions than I could have made in 1900 about the shape of 1957 automobiles. What men will do when free to try is as mysterious and as unfathomable and as miraculous as all the ideas aU Americans will have tomorrow and all the days afterr I sit at my dinner table in New York. The meat comes from Kansas; the salt from Michigan; the pepper from Singapore; the tea from Japan. The brown sugar from Louisiana and the kirschwasser from Switzerland are on a grapefruit from Florida, broiled in an oven made in Los Angeles, and heated with electricity generated in New York City from Pennsylvania coal. I cannot trace the magic of it all-how every item seems to be where I am when I want it. This phenomenon is so common place to the millions around this largest city of the world that hardly anyone ever thinks about it. They take this perfection for granted and raise their voices to high heaven only when a coercive force interferes, like a strike or a government control. Talk about delivery!

4 The Congress, in 1956, in granting wage emoluments to postal employees, decreed that the increases could not be used for the purpose of establishing postal rates. This sort of c'bookkeeping" would have to cease. [399 ] There isn't any argument for government in the mail business; there is only the clamor for the continuance of special privilege. This will cease when the free market is restored. The condition that prevails in the absence of special privilege is known as justice. Then, why not let anyone deliver mail? [400] DOLLARS DOWN THE DRAIN t'J 5. A. JJarper ~ THE STORY which follows could be told for practically any community in the United States, in type if not in degree and form. It could be your own community. Westchester County, north of the City of New York, is said to be the wealthiest residential county in the United States. Not every resident there is a millionaire, of course. But the area, over-all, is one outstandingly wealthy in the United States; fabulously wealthy for the world as a whole.