Monday, March 23, 2009

Spoon man

Every time that I hear about incompetence on behalf of the US Postal Service, I think of Lysander Spooner. Spooner was a colorful person who started a private company to compete with the US Postal Service monopoly in the mid-1800s. He was so successful that the post office sued him for competing with their monopoly. They eventually drove him out of business with litigation, even though he was delivering mail more cheaply than they were. The fact that we still have a government run post office monopoly is absolutely absurd.

He was such a thorn in side of government that the State of Ohio drained a river to damage land that Spooner owned. That’s my kind of dude.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's been said that the USPS subsidizes express mail to maintain competitive prices with UPS et al. Maybe that's the real reason for stamps to cost what they do (cheaper if you knew someone before he got caught ;)

Anonymous said...

Same reason why the Guvrnmint wants to squash charter/private schools. Those schools are so much better run and more sucessful, that the screwed up public school system will NEVER be able to compete. Sad.