All I ask is a posh spice stamp….

Libertarian Grand Poobah Harry Browne makes this comment in his book “Government Doesn’t Work”: “It (government) can’t deliver the mail on time…,” which is but one in a laundry list of the things he says that the government screws up.

Such timing; I stumbled over this quote while web surfing and sending an e-mail to someone in the states who’s got something important to “FedEx” to me. I’ve got nothing against FedEx, but I said save your money and just put it in the normal mail. It will get here soon enough.

One of the most knee jerk complaints in the U.S. seems to be about the post office. I claim no expertise in matters postal, but, from my man-on-the-street, Joe Average perspective, I think the post office is some kind of work of genius. How they get all that stuff from everywhere, to anywhere, without losing at least half of it is an utter mystery to me. I can’t even move a week’s worth of papers from my home to my office without at least 20 percent of it rearranging itself and some of it become Missing In Action for days on end. Sometimes I’m tempted to just mail the stuff to myself, at least I know it would arrive safe and sound.

For less than the price of a candy bar, you can send a letter to, say, New York, which is just about half way around the world, or to New Jersey, which is a different world entirely. How are you going to beat that?
You can’t. Sure, e-mail is cool, but there are times when only a letter will do.

As for that “lost in the mail” routine, we all know that e-mail is thousands, perhaps even zillions, of times more likely to get “lost” than snail mail is.

I’m no fan of big government, and I’ll give a fair reading to those who aren’t a fan of it either, as long as they’re not nut cases. Browne, to his credit, is a smart guy, a good writer, and has some good insights. But it seems to me that he dilutes his credibility, and sounds positively dogmatic, when he implies that the postal service is some kind of failure. If 100 of us were to vote whether we should abolish it or not, I’ll bet 99 percent of us would say, “let’s keep it. Just come out with a Posh Spice stamp, please.”

If a private company had the same market power that the post office had, I’m not convinced that we, the consumers, would be any better off for it.

I know if I owned a mail monopoly, we’ll all be in trouble. I have trouble finding my car keys most mornings, so I don’t know how I’d manage a fleet of trucks. I seldom remember my own ZIP code–I’m not making this up, I had to consult my drivers license to find the code today when filling out a form. Little wonder: I’m hopeless when it comes to filling out, filing, and keeping track of forms, which must be a big part of postal service management. Moreover, the post office has to keep track of every single package it encounters, while I’ve misplaced a lawn mower, entire file cabinets, and even two blonde Pi Beta Phi’s over the years.

So I sat down and wrote a letter to this Mr.Harry Browne, asking him to kindly reconsider his stance on our fair postal service. Here’s a quote…er, uh..hold on..I can’t seem to find the letter, it’s buried in a heap of papers here somewhere.. No matter, I would have lost it on the way to the mailbox, anyway. But I know if I could get it that far, it would certainly arrive safely on Mr. Browne’s desk.