USPS: New animosity?

In the milieu of the publishing of my last article, focusing on the inadequacies and failures of the United States Postal System (i.e. the post office), I just finished reading Wendy McElroy's excellent account of the USPS as a system of constitutional injustice and aversion. Written for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), McElroy pulls most of her information from Dorothy Fowler's Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office, one of the many literary discourses available that seek to address the constitutional, economic, and philosophical faults of a state-based monopoly in the postal system. For convenience purposes, I am providing a few of the article highlights:

The idea of a state-based monopoly in the postal violates constitutional rights in at at least three ways:

1. Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution authorized Congress to "establish post offices and post roads," but it didn't bar others from doing so as well. The power to create was not a power to prohibit.
2. Because the freedom of press includes and requires the right to privately distribute material to whoever wishes to read it, a government postal system can ban periodicals from using "virtually the only legal channels of distribution."
3. The USPS Monopoly can be used for individual, political vendettas of those in power.
   

McElroy continues to provide tangible examples, corroborating each of the aforementioned constitutional arguments. In the case of presenting an affront to the freedom of press, we we look to the late 1780s, prior to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. To quote, "The Federalists dominated in the cities through which mail flowed. As a result, Anti-Federalists' communications seemed to disappear or be strangely delayed. The Federalist Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard came under particular attack for allegedly stopping the flow of Anti-Federalist information."

It does not, however, stop there. In 1872, the USPS decided to grant second-class postal rates (cheaper than the first-class), to newspapers that had satisfied an array of requirements, most notably that the information be "of public character or be devoted to literature, the sciences, or some special industry." Because of this requirement, Moses Harman, editor and publisher of Lucifer the Light Bearer, was denied meeting the lower-rates because his publication included a letter that identified forced sex within a marriage as rape.

Following the 1960s era, the Post Office Department began to keep a list of everyone who received "questionable" mail, most predominantly one that seeks to disseminate radical information (i.e. communist propaganda). Other examples include the banning of the mailing of "unmailable" material as un-American political doctrines during World War I and "subversive propaganda" during World War II.

The editorial additionally puts significant focus on economic abuses. In the September of 2000, for example, the corporation "launched a $12 million campaign to advertise a new Internet service, eBillPay, through which customers could pay their bills electronically." Ironically, because of the legal monopoly that it holds, in conjunction with the fact that it is a state-funded (i.e. paid by regular citizens) monopoly; the owners of firms that would compete with eBillPay, including Paytrust and Billpay, are now required to pay taxes to support their competition. Our federal government truly has a questionable view of the idea of "public benefit," which the system is supposed to maximize.

In another instance of blatant corporate injustice, the postal department decreed that those wishing to send mail to private mail boxes (often used by small businesses and those wishing to preserve their privacy) must indicate that the box is a Private Mail Box (PMB) on the line preceding the box number itself, allegedly as to reduce mail scams, though as argued by Jere Glover, chief counsel of the Office of Advocacy of the small Business Administration, "There is no indication that using a '#' or 'PMB' in an address will in any way deter fraud." What are the repercussions of this decision?

1. The government has now a comprehensive list of the people (including their addresses, given that the government ordered in a different decree that private mail box providers have to keep track of this information) who own the private mail boxes, hampering people's trust in the security that the company provides.
2. As McElroy explains, "many small businesses are discourage from using private mailboxes with a designation--PMB--that stigmatized them as a 'second class' ventures. Thus another competitor of the USPS is placed at a disadvantage in the marketplace."

It truly does fascinate me that our system of economic regulation, based on the archaic and ideal neoclassical theory of perfect competition, would allow this kind of injustice to occur. Again, only one solution presents itself: abolish and privatize the postal system.