Thomas Sowell on the Death of Kodak Cameras and the Post Office
From his column today at National Review:
As the complicated photographic plates used by 19th-century photographers gave way to film, Kodak became the leading film maker of the 20th century. But sales of film declined for the first time in 2000, and sales of digital cameras surpassed the sales of film cameras just three years later. Just as Kodak’s technology made older modes of photography obsolete more than a hundred years ago, so the new technology of the digital age has left Kodak behind.
Great names of companies in other fields have likewise vanished as new technology brought new rivals to the forefront, or else made the whole product obsolete, as happened with typewriters, slide rules, and other products now remembered only by an older generation. That is what happens in a market economy, and we all benefit from it as consumers.
Unfortunately, that is not what happens in government. The post office is a classic example. Post offices were once even more important than Eastman Kodak, and for a longer time, as the mail provided vital communications linking people and organizations across thousands of miles. But, today, technology has moved even further beyond the post office than it has beyond Eastman Kodak.
For some reason this statement (an excuse for the persistent unemployment in spite of government stimulus) from our Innovator-in-Chief Barack Obama springs to mind:
There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.
Imagine if the federal government had nationalized the photography business in the early 20th century. If it had done so then today would I have a cellular phone that gives me the ability to take an unlimited number of images? How might our postage system be different today if at an earlier point in time the federal government had backed off and allowed private companies to increase quality and decrease costs through competition and innovation?
See also, recently published at PJM and related to this subject, Michael Espersen’s very persuasive case to Privatize the Schools.
Why hide your motive for attacks on the postal system? You hate them because they are unionized, and because their members receive a pension that allows them a dignified retirement.
The USPS provides an indispensible service, moving physical information and goods great distances at very low cost. Until someone figures out how to teleport a paper invoice or letter or birthday card from a sender to my doorstep for 44 cents, we need a post office.
Not all transactions can be conducted digitally.
M of D:
But the bulk of the documents in the US Mails are business related…and can be moved instantaneously by email or fax. Also overnight service by FedEx, USP, and others are more than competitive with the same delivery service by USPS.
A business would find its transmitting documents’ costs would balloon if left to the post office at their fees.
Hence competition is a winner for a large segment of the population.
And I would not weep to find no more junk mail delivered to me…
Postal Pensions – My step grandfather had one of those and it provided far more than a dignified retirement. He collected that pension (paid for by me) for nearly 30 years – and deposited it into an account for his own kids to inherit after his death, total value was $2.5 million dollars. Yes, the fact that he plead poverty and leached off of my grandmother and my parents to support him for those 30 years does still chap my hide.
Dispensable Service – Each week, my home receives about 100 pieces of mail, of those 100 pieces, 99 are unsolicited advertisements which are thrown in the trash without opening. At least, 1 of those 99 pieces each week is an advertisement from the USPS. Over the holidays, FedEx and UPS were starting deliveries at 6am and running until well after 9pm in our area. The post office in our area did not do any package delivery – everyone received notices in their regular mail that everything was being held at the post office for pick up. The wait in that line was running upwards of 2 hours.
Post Office services – Being very unsatisfied with the service provided at our business through our street box and mail person, we changed over to a mailbox service operated by a UPS Store. All I can say is that the service is stellar. I receive a daily text on how many pieces of mail (if any) I have in my box. All of my UPS and FedEx packages are left with them if I’m not in my office. The staff is always pleasant and eager to assist with whatever I need. They can handle shipping for all the different services.
Legal Notices – I just finished up dealing with a lengthy and complicated legal case. My attorney used a private courier service or email for all communications. Almost all other legal notices that I need to deal with for business purposes, are handled through UPS or FedEx because “they can be tracked”.
Oh, yes. And thank G*d that carrying letters is such a difficult and specialized profession, taking years of training and secret knowledge available only to the U.S. government, otherwise that would sound really silly. Moving physical information and goods long distances at low cost is so unattainable, there has never been another company in the US with the sheer guts to so much as pick up a package. People who try are stared into submission by the package and end up curled up in the corner sucking their thumb. Well, except FedEx and UPS, but they don’t count because… shut up, they don’t.
As we all know, the cheapest and most efficient way to do ANYTHING is to have a government agency handle it. That way, the cost can be dramatically increased by layers and layers of bureaucratic inefficiency, and then jacked back down magically, through the simple expedients of A: printing money, and B: lowering “tax expenditures”. It’s perfect! Why let private enterprises like FedEx and UPS, which provide substantially similar services, finally carry letters in addition to packages? They might use evil forces like capitalism- guilty of diabolical things like improving the living standard of the entire globe by promoting rapid innovation- to push the price down. Sure, they might even find a way to provide it cheaper than 44 cents, but it just wouldn’t have that extra special government goodness, now would it?
In fact, I think it’s important that we have government agencies provide ALL “indispensable services”! Can you imagine what would happen if all the grocery stores were to suddenly go out of business? Most people in inner-city areas would STARVE! Why, I’m going to go write my congressman right now and demand that they open a tax-subsidized Fed-Mart grocery chain, so that this essential service will never be interrupted. But wait! If the farms and factories that supply the grocery stores went out, the service would STILL be interrupted. We’d better make nice little Fed-Farms that will supply the grocery stores in an emergency. Heck, let’s think ahead and make Fed-Trucks and Fed-Fuel so that the supply to these places will never be interrupted, either. And just because, as Mr. Disaster so perceptively pointed out (via carefully reading completely invisible words you didn’t write), “You hate them because they are unionized, and because their members receive a pension that allows them a dignified retirement”, we’ll teach you pesky taxpayers an *extra* lesson.
Let’s encourage the formation of yet more public unions, which we’ll have under the tutelage of some established union like, say, a postal union. That way, the leaders of each union can learn the basics of running a public union: using taxpayer money to fund politicians in return for kickbacks, striking and failing to provide the service they supposedly provide because their higher-than-private-sector paychecks and benefits are too low, and engaging in mob violence during “peaceful demonstrations”. Once a public union has gotten good enough at ensuring that it’s nearly impossible to fire any of its workers, regardless of how much they suck, let’s make sure to provision them with pensions that are also larger than those of their private sector counterparts. Provisioning useless drones will also help us balance our budget, by taking money associated with the creation of value and spending it on completely valueless things, thus making it go away. That way, our accountants won’t have as much money to keep track of. I can’t think of a single thing in the last… oh, say, three years… that might indicate there is anything wrong with that plan.
No, you’re clearly an evil, heartless, capitalist, racist, meanie for suggesting that things work more efficiently when the government isn’t running them just because they do. Doubly so if you viciously suggest that Mr. Disaster coloring this article as an attack when the post office is being used only as an exemplar might indicate that he has a slight chip on his shoulder.
I have yet to see any worker at the post office moving faster than a snail, no matter how many people are at the counter. From my experience as a cashier (non-union and long ago) and more recent experience as a clerk in private enterprise (non-union), I’d say they could generally handle twice the number of customers they do on a continous bases simply by moving faster, and four times as many for brief periods.
From my experience as a union member, I suspect the reason they move so slowly is to put pressure on the USPS to increase the number of positions at the front counter.
M of D, they can’t do it for 44 cents. If they could they would be solvent. Don’t get me started on the pension double dippers at the USPS.
I’d like the Post Office to stay around for letter and I often prefer them for small packages, the big shippers are much more business oriented than private citizen oriented.
It seems to me it can be saved by a little fiddling – raise first class to a round fifty cents (at least), raise junk mail prices or eliminate, whichever would be best, cut Saturday delivery, AND CUT THE LINES AT THE COUNTERS, someone tell these bastards about queuing theory!
Just maybe the Post Office should also move into cyberspace and offer confirmed and secured email with full legal standing – OK, so might private businesses. So why have a GSE post office at all? Because the physical delivery suggests a “natural monopoly” that is going to be much more expensive done privately and redundantly – because what you DON’T want is a private monopoly, or even duopoly.
I respect Thomas Sowell’s economics greatly, but he ignores critical elements in his critique of the postal service.
First and foremost, the Post Office is a direct, delegated power and responsibility of the federal government under the Constitution. Any discussion of privatizing or eliminating the Post Office that does not start with “First we amend the Constitution” is disingenuous at best, unconstitutionally subversive at worst.
Second, as a delegated power and responsibility of the federal government, mail sent through the Post Office enjoys a specific legal privilege. Interfering with the U.S. mail is a federal offense. That is why no one else can casually place anything within a mailbox on your property – in doing so they are trespassing on a direct relationship between the individual and his government. Understanding such, it becomes obvious why no private service should be granted anything even vaguely resembling the same privilege.
Third, as he has to admit, service to some areas is simply too expensive for the private companies to consider. That means all of us are going to have to subsidize the Post Office for those people who live in less accessible areas. That also includes the otherwise begged category of those people who live in areas without electronic communications access, or who simply cannot afford it despite the otherwise great overall wealth of the nation.
Ultimately failing to account for those factors leaves any call to privatize the Post Office as an issue of ideological purity rather than rational function. Particularly coming from Thomas Sowell and his critiques of non-free market systems the foolishness of such should be obvious.
I dot see why the Constitution needs to be amended. Congress is granted the power to establish post offices and post roads. It doesn’t say Congress must do so, just as the power to borrow on the credit of the United States doesn’t obligate us into carrying debt. Furthermore, the Constitution is completely silent on the means by which Congress may exercise this power. A bill that abolished the USPs and designated FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc as postal carriers (with the same legal protections the mail currently enjoys) would meet Constitutional muster. In fact, by the strictest reading of the document, the USPS is largely unconstitutional, nowhere does it grant the federal government the power to transport or deliver mail, just establish post offices and post roads.
I have a friend who worked as a parts rep for a company that supplied heavy mining equipment. As a regular part of his job he would ship parts to mining sites, usually remote, using FedEx ground. I’m sure that if FedEx can get a pump shaft to Askrak, Manitoba they can get a letter to anyone’s door.
The post office near my office is a dismal, filthy, disorganized Third World outpost. Step into that building—a hideous Bland Corporate interior that was a gut-rehab of a beautiful Post Office building about 90 years old—and you know that you will be in for a lengthy wait at windows understaffed (half never have clerks) by people who barely speak English.
The “barely speak English” part is interesting. For some unknown reason, the local Post Office satrap makes a point of pulling people off the route that delivers to my office as soon as they learn the route, which ensures that mail is constantly mis-delivered. One day I ran into the former mail carrier for the route—the only efficient carrier we’ve had—and stopped to pass the time of day. In the course of our conversation, as I was grumbling about the apparent inability of our current letter carrier to read English or street numbers, he mentioned that there had been a scandal involving professional test-takers substituting for non-English-speaking Post Office applicants. I observed that all the people hired during the period covered by the scandal should be fired, or at least re-tested. “I would oppose that,” he replied; “That’s discrimination.”
That is why the Post Office is a nightmare and the postal unions must go.
Buzzsawmonkey:
Remove the ‘postal’ from your last sentence and you’re spot on. I grew up in Michigan and have seen first-hand the incredible damage that unions do. They are like lethal parasites.
Can anyone name ANY union that is doing any good, currently?
Yes, there was a time when they were needed and did great work. Now they are corrupt, destructive, and venal.
Orion
A government-designed cell phone would weigh 10 lbs., cost $45,000, and its battery would catch fire with alarming frequency.
From the posts above I would have to assume that postal workers read PJ Media. I’m kind of surprised, but hey, why not?
Keep the Postal Service, but please don’t try and tell me that it’s functions are so vitally important that they have to stop at my house everyday.
I’d be very happy to have home mail delivery only 2 days a week, instead of 6 days now. There just isn’t anything important enough for me to have to get it every day.
There, I just cut the USPS staff by 66%. You’re welcome.