printGiven a choice, why would you want to fund the United States Postal Service?
CNN: “A city councilman in Berkeley [where else?], California, floated the idea of taxing emails as part of a broader Internet tax that could be used… to fund your local post office.”
MATT WELCH, of REASON MAGAZINE:
This is like taxing, you know, horse and buggies or taxing cars to keep horse and buggies business. Why are we taxing the great new thing so that we can prop up the bad old thing? It’s completely backwards.
It’s — I mean, the fact that it’s coming in Berkeley, which is not a punch line, it’s the home of the free speech movement 50 years ago, for crying out loud. And we’re going to put a punitive tax on one of the greatest free speech instruments in our lifetime. It’s absurd and sad.
…there’s a thing called an e-mail filter. I mean, I don’t know what you use, but I haven’t seen my cousin from Nigeria e- mail for more than a year simply because there is a spam filter that works, a spam filter that no government gave me, no tax created, no bureaucrat. …
The government is not a jobs program. It just isn’t. It shouldn’t be, rightfully so. And so, the fact that Congress won’t allow a single post office to shut down is part of the problem. If you lift the mandate and open everything up to competition, it would be a much different story.
REIHAN SALAM of National Review:
We have these amazing things called private companies that have actually mostly solved this problem. These days, most of unsolicited mail you get goes into a spam folder and those services are getting better and better over time. … Already people are migrating from one technology that becomes crappy and clogged with spam to another technology. …What the post service does now, the bulk of what they send is what I like to call physical spam which is actually worse for the environment. It’s rather unpleasant and now the postal service is saying the federal government has undermined them by saying they’re saying we have to adequately fund our pension, that’s crazy talk.
And so postal employees are funding ads on my television that are visual spam that are telling us this is some grave injustice they should fund these crazy pension obligations they have built up over years. …
But I don’t see every other industry should have to subsidize postal carries, because they are struggling [and can] use those resources to provide innovative new services.
Read “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You” for my “seven-year saga” with the local post office worker’s “sadistic displays of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive ‘customers’ are pinned down like butterflies by ‘service providers.’ The discretion left to these petty tyrants is wide; fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.”