Our forefathers saw the importance of rural free delivery. They created the Post Office as their commitment to equality in our nation’s communication system, whether you live in the city or the country. They held that folks living in the country should not be penalized and have to pay more for mail than folks living in cities. This wasn’t about making money, it was about equality across our country.
Some people argue that making money is more important than preserving this equality. Technically speaking, they are correct that the postal service could make more money—but guess who would have to pay? Everything hinges on density and distance. It doesn’t take a genius to make money charging $0.50 to deliver a letter or parcel from East 54th Street to East 55th Street in New York City. The problem is that making money sending the same letter or parcel from NYC to, say, Lansing, Michigan is going to cost $20.00—and sending that same letter or parcel from Lansing to, say, Tempe, Arizona is going to cost $40.00. The longer the distance, and the lighter the population density, the more some people are going to have to pay for exactly the same service.
Our forefathers rejected the idea that people in America should have to pay more—or pay less—to communicate with each other. That’s why they established the Post Office as part of the Articles of Confederation, later placed into the First Amendment of our Constitution. They seemed to grasp that a teacher in Boston and an auto mechanic in Miami both should be able to send a card to their mother in Cincinnati for the same cost. They were creating and preserving a better social policy, preserving the society we want to live in—not necessarily the best way of making money.
Said differently, the inequality created by disabling the Post Office creates another social cost. Paying more to mail from Baton Rouge to Omaha than from North to South Chicago means that some Americans inevitably will be “in” the country’s communications loupe while others will fall “outside” it. Residents of Chicago or SanFrancisco will have access to information that simply doesn’t reach Oklahoma City or Portland (Oregon or Maine) because it costs too much more. Creating levels or tiers in which information is available to some Americans, but not others, is simply bad social policy.
Incidentally, the right wing contends that the marketplace will create greater efficiency when the Post Office is replaced by private enterprise. (They say this about everything, including medicine, but that’s another topic.). This old theory has been shown to be factually incorrect in that private companies, such as Fed Ex and UPS, use the Post Office to deliver to their customers in “last leg” destinations. Said differently, without the Post Office, Fed Ex and UPS would have to raise their prices dramatically to reach the doorstep of those outside major cities.
At the psychological level, the puzzle is why some Americans, from Ohio to Nevada, are voting for a Trumpian policy that is going to cost them money for no benefit. This Trumpian policy has introduced a Russian oligarchy into America, something we never thought possible before. Trumpian thinking is Russian thinking. Privatizing the Post Office is a replica of Russia’s grabbing their society’s assets and selling them off to private oligarchs, who then make money by charging back the citizenry for goods and services that used to cost less. Plus which, the Post Office, in its Constitutionally-protected right to serve our democracy, city and rural, red and blue, is our best assurance that we’re protected against being deprived of our right to vote. If Trumpian thinking makes voting-by-mail impossible for the November election, this will be a Russian-type coup bringing sorrow to America for decades to come. I hope that citizens from New Hampshire to New Mexico realize that, just as if Putin closed our voting sites, closing the Post Office curtails our right to vote.
