The Post Office is Pricing Itself Out of Business

In true government fashion the U.S. Post Office with monopoly power , without a worry about competition, is on the road to oblivion. Cost control by an arrogant subsidized protected organization is a feeble gesture that only is used for propaganda and has no baseline to relate to. Without having to demonstrate a bottom line and meeting the competition, the lumbering Post Office blatantly raises its rates and changes its way of charging for postage with no regard to the consequences to businesses and consumers. Meanwhile as they ignore the market changes in moving messages and literature, the demise rears its head for those who are looking to the future.

If it becomes cheaper to put a letter in a package and send it UPS who will be dumb enough to buy a $4.00 stamp and measure the envelope, stand in a stamp line and put up with the impersonal guff of a government clerk who delights in rejecting whatever happens to be out of specification? Call it a black market but the reality is when the government eventually screws up what ever business it has decided to meddle in, goods and services will emerge which are affordable and superior. Only the fear of fines and imprisonment will quell the rush for better better good and services which is the government’s answer to providing poor overpriced service without having a competitor to force efficiencies and cost containment.

The phenomena of e-mail has eliminated millions of would be letters and stamp revenue. Yet the Post Office continues to build huge mausoleums , staff them with bundle shufflers, operate with a bloated bureaucracy and whimsically raise the price of stamps to compensate for giving us more restrictions, less hours of availability of service and never any hope of a reduction in the price of a stamp. This price fixing by government has put the government’s monopoly of first class delivery in a category that can only destroy itself as the market pulls further and further away from the expense of postal delivery.

Like Amtrak this government run business is rapidly reaching the point of no return ( pun intended). Those businesses that transfer messages such as telephones, computers and homing pigeons are daily becoming cheaper and more convenient. But like the Big Three automakers that ignored the need for more fuel efficient and reliable automobiles, the Post Office is setting itself up for the same kind of wake-up call. Meanwhile sleepy eyed Congress is so wrapped up in spitting at each other they are not even peripherally aware that another government “business” is in trouble and will require a disbursement of unearned public funds to keep itself struggling along.

As technology rapidly eliminates the paper and envelope from correspondence there will be no recognition that an anachronism is vanishing. The subsidies will mount , the need for retrenchment will be evident to all except the entrenched and meanwhile a new generation will swiftly advance beyond the marvel of self sticking stamps. Blackberries with test messages, cell phones with text, computers with emails will all continue to replace the old fashioned scribbles, trips to get stamps and to drop an envelope in a box that won’t be picked up in the time it would take to send a text message. It is the residual horse and buggy message senders that will shore up the Post Office for a while but as they relearn or die off, the future will dictate the demise of that which has lived out its era.

Meanwhile the employees who can see the writing on the wall will prepare for new jobs and new technology. And those who refuse to see the future evolving around them will cling to their mastodon grumbling that the government should do something. For those who don’t get it, the government did do something. It created a business that lived on its laurels, succumbed to stagnant thinking, forcefully eliminated competition and dissolved under the onslaught of innovation. This is the best that government can do in the business world. It cannot consolidate, innovate, or survive in the long run. Business is dynamic while government is stagnant. The constant pressure of competing is foreign to government. It advertises to justify its existence, not to lure customers from competitors. It tallies its revenues, audits its costs and uses this calculation to provide a service that is trending toward obsolescence. It ignores the services that are replacing it and simply hikes its stamp revenue to proceed oblivious of the obvious.

Privatization is a dirty word to the politicians of today who are so hungry for power they cannot see the plans they espouse are failures waiting to happen. Government cannot provide because government cannot produce. Government can only restrict and redistribute. This can be readily seen by the attempts of government to take over a productive enterprise. The railroads ( when there was sufficient demand ) grew and provided superior service, expanded and prospered. But they ultimately failed to recognize superior transportation was becoming available and would soon make them obsolete. Amtrak was not a survivor but a subsidized failure that continues to show the world it cannot be sustained being run by the government. This too is the fate of the Post Office eventually.

If government cannot run a business (which requires carefully accounting of costs) and which is proven by the propensity of government to overspend the most logical question to ask is, “ Why does government meddle in business at all?”. The answer is because politicians of today , like their brothers of the past, are blinded by the reach for power and cannot recognize that power requires a responsibility that no agency that deals in force can provide. Government is limited in its scope and ability to being a guardian of trade activity. It can interfere but it will ultimately fail just as the Soviet Union proved to all the world. What ever the name of the ideology promoting government substituting for private industry whether it be communism, fascism, or statism in any form, the path is identical and the results are predictable. And what ever agency the government ( any government ) decides to nationalize and run will suffer from the inherent fault of non-competitive enterprise. Without the impetus of competition and the profit motive only the long lines of rationed goods and services appears. Or we have an abundance of the irrelevant . Bread in the Soviet Union went to waste as will uncanceled stamps as progress continues in the U.S. Meanwhile the employer of Congress (the taxpayer ) exerts few expectations on that body of inertia. And as a result we pay for that which we don’t need, that costs too much and is only being preserved out of blind apathy. Like Social Security the end of the Post Office is coming and the creators of these dinosaurs have no idea how to sustain them and are unwilling to question whether they should exist at all. Congress has an abundance of presidential candidates in the 2008 race for the White House yet none of them recognize the lack of leadership their apathy displays with regard to the failure of government to get out of the world of commerce and let free enterprise thrive. This speaks volumes of what it is they crave to see. An America under the thumb of a tyrannical government that runs all the business, treats taxpayers like serfs and elevates the elected to positions of opulence. If Americans wanted that wouldn’t we all migrate to Venezuela ?