Anything That’s Peaceful

• CHAPTER 14 •

MAIL BY MIRACLE

MY FELLOW PANELIST, a college dean who espoused government security programs of all sorts, had never before encountered anyone who insisted that government should be limited, without exception, to keeping the peace. Finally, in exasperation, he delivered this intended coup de grace: “Well, if my panelist friend thinks that government should be so severely limited, I would like to have him tell this audience how private enterprise could deliver the mail.”

He was voicing a common sentiment: Private enterprise deliver the mail? Preposterous! Also, this dean of Labor and Industry was revealing a shocking and common lack of understanding as to how the market works. It is this widespread failure to grasp the miracle of the market which accounts, in no small measure, for the mass turn toward socialism. If there is no faith in getting jobs done by men acting freely, privately, cooperatively, competitively, willingly, voluntarily, peacefully, to that extent will people believe in political authority to guide human action. It’s either peace or force; there is no in-between!

Let your imagination take you back just one century, to the year 1864. Suppose, at that time, you had been asked to select the easiest of the following assignments:

1. Deliver the mail;

2. Deliver the human voice a thousand miles;

3. Deliver a dozen individuals from San Francisco to Miami in one day;

4. Deliver an event visually a mile from where it takes place, at the time of its occurrence.

Which of the four would have seemed easiest to accomplish in 1864? Number 1, for certain! Numbers 2, 3, and 4 would then have appeared utterly impossible, too fantastic to be taken seriously. The easiest one of the four—delivery of the mail—has been left in the hands of government. Numbers 2, 3, and 4 have been dealt with so competently and expansively in the free market that we have taken them for granted; we never give them a second thought. So, let us ask, how well has government handled the mail?

For all practical purposes, the government uses the same methods of gathering, sorting, and delivering the mail that it did 100 years ago.

The mail is slower today than it was before World War II.

A letter often takes 48 hours to travel 100 miles.

The Post Office is floundering in a sea of mail that gets deeper every year.

Rates on first-class mail have been hiked 150 per cent since 1932, yet the deficit for the mail operation is now running close to $1,000,000,000 a year, about $3,000,000 for each working day, or ten times what it was in 1932.

Almost all proposals for solving this generally acknowledged bureaucratic failure are predicated on government’s remaining in the mail business, as though this were as proper a function of government as is keeping the peace. Proposed solutions range all the way from getting a more competent Postmaster General to appropriating millions of dollars for research, all aimed at the hopeless objective of making a government enterprise efficient.

The Constitution Says So

There are numerous reasons why most people assume that government ought to be responsible for mail delivery. One is this: At our nation’s outset, the most respected of American political instruments, The Constitution of the U.S.A., proclaimed, “The Congress shall have power … to establish post offices.…” The Congress exercised this power. There are now nearly 40,000 post offices.

But Congress went further than the permissibility granted by the Constitution. Congress outlawed competition; it declared mail delivery a government monopoly. No one, today, may carry first-class mail for pay except on a subcontract arrangement with Uncle Sam. The mail business is the government’s—period!

When any activity has been monopolized by government for years, persons with entrepreneurial aptitudes rarely think of it as an opportunity for private enterprise. The enterpriser seldom spends any time trying to think how to do something that he will never have a chance to try. An activity monopolized by government soon becomes both “untouchable” and “unthinkable.” Thus, everyone—almost —assumes the mail business to be a proper function of government.

Almost! Now and then, however, there are individuals who question the generally accepted premise. Their reasoning goes something like this: More pounds of fresh milk are delivered every day than pounds of mail. Fresh milk is more perishable than a love letter or a catalogue or an appeal for funds or a picture magazine or an entertainment journal. Fresh milk delivery is more efficient, more prompt, lower priced than mail delivery. Why shouldn’t men in the market place—acting privately, competitively, voluntarily, cooperatively, peacefully—deliver mail? They deliver freight, which is heavier.

Not only the “man in the street,” but a high proportion of enterprisers themselves believe that government should deliver mail. Unwittingly, they have lost faith in themselves as free men to deliver mail. Why?

Free Enterprise Does the Job

First, ask this question: How far could the human voice be delivered 100 years ago? The answer is, the distance two champion hog callers could effectively communicate—about 44 yards. But, left free to try, enterprisers have discovered how to deliver the human voice around this earth, for instance, which is 1,000,000 times as far, and in one-seventh of a second. That’s roughly the same time it takes the voice of one hog caller to reach the ear of the other. Quite an accomplishment in delivery, isn’t it?

When we have left enterprisers free to try, they have discovered how to deliver a Rose Bowl game, a Shakespearean play, or whatever into everyone’s living room in motion and in color at the time it is going on.

When we have left these enterprisers free to try, they have discovered how to deliver 115 individuals from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours.

When free to try, they have discovered how to deliver gas from Texas to homes in New York at low cost.

When free to try, they have discovered how to deliver every four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard for less money than government charges to deliver a one-ounce letter from Irvington-on-Hudson to adjacent Tarrytown.

And these are the people—the ones who have had a hand in these miracles—who have lost faith in themselves as free men to deliver letters.

While the last comparison is somewhat loaded, this example of free market oil delivery, on a weight-distance-time basis, wins against the example of mail delivery by more than 10,000 to 1!

Let’s try another comparison. The fastest mail service is an airmail letter. With the best of luck a letter posted in Irvington-on-Hudson at 5 p.m. could be in the hands of an addressee in Los Angeles 40 hours later, and for 8 cents. Now, consider the incomparably more complex problem of a personal conversation with the same Angelino. He can be reached and a three-minute talk-fest completed in three and one-fourth minutes, and for $2.25 (plus tax). True, this is 30 times more costly but 750 times faster!

Interestingly enough, the A.T. & T., by far the largest of the human voice communicators, has, during the period when the Post Office was losing $10,000,000,000, showed a profit of $22,000,000,000.

In the light of overwhelming evidence on every hand, why does anyone cling to the notion that a letter can be delivered only by a governmental agency? Instead, we should marvel that people in government are able to deliver the mail at all; not because they are less talented than the A.T. & T. folks, but simply because of the manner in which they are organized to do the job.

Suppose you were asked to head a business—one of the largest in the world—one in which you were wholly inexperienced and to which you had given no thought, as is the case with the mill run of Postmasters General. Next, assume that a substantial part of your key personnel had to be selected on the basis of political preferment. And, finally, imagine that the income of the business depended not on willing exchanges in a free market but on appropriations made to your business by two directorates, of 100 and 435 members respectively (the Senate and House), all having more in mind their own political fortunes than the business for which you have been given responsibility. With responsibility and authority so unrelated, and with the other obstacles mentioned, what kind of a performance do you think you could turn in?

Imagine this: A century ago the Post Office—headed, manned, and organized as above—was given a monopoly of all transportation and all communications. What, today, would be the shape of trains, trucks, planes, telephones, wireless, radar had these activities been monopolized as has the mail? Is there any reason to believe that there would have been progress in these technologies? Wouldn’t these, like the Post Office, be about as they were 100 years ago?

The Market Not Appreciated

The fact that the Constitution empowered Congress to put government in the postal business does not make it right. The same Constitution condoned slavery.

Nor is government postal service justified by the dangerous and popular notion that government should do for the people that which they cannot or will not do for themselves. If this were a sound rule, then anything the government ever attempted would become a proper government function simply because most people tend to give up—realizing the futility of trying to compete with the tax collector.

Nor can government postal service be justified on the Rural Free Delivery argument. If a person elects to live atop Pike’s Peak, let him get his mail as he does his cornflakes or milk or whatever. Why should the rest of us subsidize his desire to have his isolation, and his mail, too?

That mail delivery should be left to the free, competitive market is so buttressed with overwhelming evidence that it is difficult to understand why we persist in our mistake. I have already given some minor reasons; the major reason is failure to understand the miracle of the market.

Omit those inexperienced in business and ask only of outstanding enterprisers, “Should mail delivery be left to the market?” Except in rare instances, their answers will be an emphatic “No!” Their thought processes go something like this: “H’m! Let me see. How would I go about delivering mail to nearly two hundred million people? By George, I don’t know. If I, a successful enterpriser, don’t know, who does? Of course mail delivery should not be left to the market. It’s a government job.”

No One Needs to Know

The fact is that our enterprising friend could spend the rest of his life reflecting on how he would deliver mail to all the people in the U.S.A. and never would he think how to do it. What he doesn’t understand is that neither he nor any other person can ever know—or needs to know—how to do the job. Do just two things and witness a miracle:

1. Let the Congress repeal the monopoly now granted to the government, thus permitting anyone to deliver mail for pay who wishes to do so, as unrestricted as grocery delivery; and

2. Let the Congress appropriate no more money to the Treasury for Post Office Department use, and insist that the accounting be on a basis comparable to private enterprise accounting, to include rentals, taxes, and so on, thus requiring the Post Office Department to charge rates that will incur no deficits.

Within a year or two or three government would be out of the mail business, completely out; private enterprise would take over the whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel. Furthermore, mail delivery would become as efficient as is the communication of sound or the delivery of groceries, taken for granted as is the supply of automobiles, without extra burden to taxpayers, and with profit to enterprisers in proportion to their capacity to cut costs and improve service.

Many will ask, how can this possibly happen when no person now knows how to deliver mail? Very well, how do we manufacture 1,600,000,000 wooden lead pencils annually without anyone knowing how to make a pencil? There, in the pencil story, is the answer: tiny, varied, multitudinous know-hows miraculously, spontaneously, automatically configurating—so long as they are free to do so—arising from where and in whom no one can remotely guess. There are thousands upon thousands of testimonies to this free market phenomenon all about us, but the miracle is so unobtrusive that, like the air we breathe, we seldom take any note of it. This wonderful mystery, which so few persons grasp, is rooted in nothing more complicated than a faith in free men. Indeed, the reason that a bureaucracy cannot efficiently deliver mail is that the individual know-hows are not free to flow; the governmental system presupposes something that does not exist: a person who knows how to deliver mail.

Some may claim that I am out to abolish the governmental postal service. But I do not consider that a first order of business. I use the postal service to illustrate that any and all men should be permitted to do anything they please, so long as it is peaceful—even deliver mail for pay; that government has no competency beyond keeping the peace. The postal service merely turns out to be the easiest way to make the point—everything about it is so obvious.