The New Economics on Display;

Some classes of mail, "library materials," for instance, will be de livered anywhere in the country for as little as 1/15 of a cent per ounce. Other classes call for other rates, but generally far below cost. Beyond this is the franked and other mail that goes "free." And the clamor of the mail-order houses and other beneficiaries, through powerful Washington lobbies, al ways is for more service and big ger subsidies. This, of course, pre cludes effective competition in mail delivery. The employees of this postal service - nearly 600,000 of them are largely unionized, which means that wages and hours of work are fixed arbitrarily rather than by competi tion. How is the new economics work ing in practice? The postal deficit gets larger each year, currently running about $1 billion. The service gets worse, not better. On occasion, delivery is so long de layed that it becomes· expedient to destroy the outdated parcels.

Why is the new economics ineffi cient in practice? Noone bureau crat-in-charge knows any more how to deliver mail than anyone person knows how to make a jet, an auto, a pencil. The remedy? Let anyone deliver mail - without subsidy! Rely on the market as we do with the de livery of groceries, or drugs, or the human voice, or people. If the new economics as applied to mail delivery is disturbing, wait till medicare runs its full course. What are we going to do with the "third-class" patients who will be backed up in long queues awaiting medical attention? Destroy them? The free market, willing ex change, voluntary economy creates no such problems of artificial short age or surplus. Supply and demand, manifested in thousands and thousands of daily choices and transactions, are always moving toward balance and equilibrium. Monopolists - government or private - are self-serving. Com petitors,on the other hand, are im pelled by their own interest to serve consumers as they serve themselves. When one competitor can't handle the business, others will. Why not .let mail delivery be handled by the market, as is freight? We never hear of these carriers destroying jam-ups. They deliver, not destroy. • 33 Blight WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, brilliant French political scientist of the nineteenth century, was equally skilled in drawing lessons from the past and foreseeing the shape of the future. He is able to com press all the tragic frustration of the French Revolution, which began with cries of "Liberty" and ended with Napoleon's military despotism, in a single incisive sen tence: "The last generation in France showed how a people might organ ize a stupendous tyranny in the community, at the very time when they were baffling the authority of the nobles and braving the power of all kings - at once teaching the Mr. Chamberlin is a skilled observer and re porter of economic and political conditions at home and abroad. In addition to writing a number of books, he has lectured widely and is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal and riumerous magazines.