Diseconomies of socialism

A few weeks ago I was having lunch with the some of the Tampa Libertarian folks, and the topic came up of the USPS as a prime example of the diseconomies of socialism. Now I've got to tell you that I've had several bad experiences with the USPS and I make it a point to never use them for anything important, so I do have a clear bias against them.

Now that we've got that out of the way here's the facts. To begin with lets get a definition of what exactly the usps is, from wikipedia we find that the USPS is is "an independent agency of the States government (see 39 U.S.C. § 201) responsible for providing postal service in the United States".

Now here's where it gets ugly, as of March 31 the USPS had lost 1.9 billion in the first quarter of 2009. And this was not unique according to Thomas L. Gallagher at the Journal of commerce http://www.joc.com/node/411196 this is the 10 of 11 straight quarters of increasing losses. In fact while the six month period ending March 31 2009 showed a loss of 2.3 billion the sixth month period of the same time for 2008 was only a loss of 35 million. Only 35 million? Only 35 million???

.......And here's the Kafkaesque rub of it all.

I don't even know anybody that even uses the USPS. We all pay our bills on line. If something is really urgent we pick up a phone. For casual communication we send emails or use internet messaging. If we need to send an important package we use UPS or Fedex. So what do we get from the USPS?

......Hmmmmmmmm ........Oh yes now I remember, about four times a week I find all that junk mail that I immediately throw in the garbage.

So let me get this straight. The U.S. government is taking my hard earned money in the form of various taxes to run a remarkably inefficient business who's primary effect is that they jam my mailbox with stuff not only that I don't want, but also that I now need to take the time to remove from my mailbox so they can refill it with more junk that I still won't want to read. And they are doing it all at a cost of about 400 million a month.

Yeah, I feel much better now, and this thing with G.M. is sure to work out just fine.

I think Mr. Friedman sums this up best.

"Many people want the government to protect the consumer.
A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government. "

-Milton Friedman