printChuckie Krauthammer hasn’t visited a United States Postal Service office lately. As a regular on Bret Baier’s Special Report, he was asked to prognosticate about the future of the USPS monopoly I described thus:
Having used the Canadian, South African and European equivalent services, I can safely say that there is no viler or more inhospitable dump than the United States Postal Service. The latter is far and away inferior to the aforementioned rival monopolies. Enviously I eye the items my mother posts from the Netherlands. Whereas mine are festooned with at least two labels per package; hers are form-free, care free, shipped with ease.
The Postal Service is in the red, for a change, “could lose a staggering $7 billion this year,” and “posted $3.8 billion in losses last year.”
The fattened Postmaster General John Potter is seeking some kind of mandate (and funding presumably … from China) to “move the Service forward.” He wants to “reinvest, redefine and reinvigorate the value of mail to business and households.”
Fighting for the USPS, its “$70 billion in unfunded liabilities, and the parasitical existence of 800,000 postal workers who live off the Federal Financing Bank (read: the taxpayer),” is Republican Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.
“If you cut back services, you’re going to lose customers,” she stammered, as if the USPS has “customers”; it has captives, pinned down like butterflies by grotesque “service providers.”
In the name of tradition, Chuckie Krauthammer expressed nostalgic sentiments for the postman who came no matter the weather, and recommended rehabilitating this institution.
As I said, he clearly has not frequented a post office in a while. It’s a monument to the multicultural Managerial State and is packed with sour, affirmative action hires who speak in tongues. Grandma in a remote hamlet is unlikely to get her mail delivered by a friendly old timer. Oh no, those government jobs are reserved for “minorities.”
Recommended: “Warning: Postal Worker Coming to A Clinic Near You”
Update (March 3): A reminder: this post is about conservatives supporting the continued nationalization of a service delivered magnificently and morally by the free market. I’m sorry liberty lovers feel it is unworthy of their attention.
Compared to the TRILLIONS wasted on America’s senseless wars and the TRILLIONS gone into Fannie/Freddie/Sallie/Goldman-Sachs/Citigroup bankster bailouts, the Post Office is a relative beacon of efficiency. And, as for unfunded liabilities, try the Social Security / Medicare / Medicaid debacle. The USPS is just a petty pickpocket compared with some of the larger theives.
Bravo! Multicultural Managerial State. Perfect. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Thank you.
The founder of the The American Letter Mail Company smiles from the grave at the failure of the USPS.
http://lysanderspooner.org/node/21
I have nothing to add here but I will anyway. I think you are getting soft. The Post Office is worse than you depict.
Please do not mistake my previous post as heaping praise on the USPS – it only concerns their relative placement in hell. The TSA, for example, is far worse to Americans and more routinely threatens them with arrest.
And Jim Ostrowski can talk about the “public education establishment” for glaring inefficiency – they CUT class size (why?) and where you used to have 1 teacher and 0.1 administrator 40 years ago, you now have 2 regular teachers, 1 “special ed” teacher, 0.5 “conselors”, and 1 bureaucrat – and
DECLINING test scores for more money!
SUCH IS THE NATURE OF GOVERNMENT – a jobs program where one person holds the bulb while numerous other parasites turn the ladder. Which is why I had to waste 2 weeks on what could have been 1.5 days of program review on a project.
[Still, by the logic of your previous post, we can’t discuss the one infraction b/c it is dwarfed by another.]
I read last piece about the post office also, but thought i would comment on this one. I dont disagree with your observations about the U.S Post Office, but stating the Postal Service in South Africa is superior?
C’mon now. Really. I lived in Pretoria from 2002 to 2006, and a sure fir way to have an item stolen (in that city at least) was to post it in the government operated postal service. It happened to me several times, until I wisened up and started using the private postal service there. In fact I recall an article in the Pretoria News in 2005 about the sad state of the S.A. postal service, and the lack of attention by the ANC to this.
[I left SA in 1995, when the SA PO was still quite civilized. Still, nowhere have I encountered the degree of label- envelope- and sheer fascistic regulation as in the US. The clerks are like cops.]
In my case, the mail personnel in my town are friendly, rarely make a mistake but if they do, correct it quickly. Most of the men will trade jokes. However a friend of mine in the next town over found the mail for his block on his porch everyday for a couple of weeks for him to deliver, while his postal delivery lady, used the time to liaison with the postmaster. When it was discovered, the small town had more excitement than it had had in months.
[Maybe the Powers That Be have refrained from meddling with the small-town USPS? However, I live in a smallish place, in a liberal county. It could not get much worse.]
The postal workers in the small part of flyover country I inhabit are friendly as well. Perhaps the unfriendly atmosphere is due to the fact that the Pacific Northwest is more multicultural? [And liberal] That said, I still have more confidence in FedEX or UPS.