Sunday, August 23, 2020

No, We Don't Need a Government Post Office

With the Postal Service's massive and unsustainable losses, what is striking is that even with a new reformer in charge, there is virtually no consideration of abandoning the USPS's monopoly on first-class mail, allowing rivalry from private providers to reveal the services and prices market competition could offer.

Not only does competition have a long record of success in countless products and services, but history shows it is not impossible in postal services.

This very belief is implicit in the arguments of government officials who refuse to permit private delivery of mail: the U.S. Postal Service couldn't stand the competition; someone else would do it more efficiently and at less cost to the customer.

As long as the monopoly is coercively maintained, there is no legal way to prove that the cost of performing an identical service would be lower under competition-or how much lower.

Such faith must concede that no one knows or can know in advance just the form in which the postal service would emerge and develop were everyone free to devote his own ingenuity and time and scarce resources toward serving the ever-changing demands of willing customers in a free market.

In the U.S.A., for example, government has a monopoly of mail delivery.

Why? Simply because government has pre-empted this activity for so many decades that all enterprisers have ceased to think how mail could be delivered were it a private enterprise opportunity.

https://mises.org/wire/no-we-dont-need-government-post-office 

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