Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Steven Farnham, a resident of Plainfield.
Like so many things these days, with the argument over closing post offices, it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with the “Close them because they don’t make any money” argument—which, by the way, is nonsense.
Compare the post office to the health insurance industry, which does make money—gobs of it. And what good is it? We could all pool our money in one place and draw from that pool to pay our healthcare providers, and send the parasitic health insurance bosses and their money-sucking organizations to the poorhouse where they belong. By many estimates, this would reduce our health care costs by 30 percent.
But we keep the health insurance industry because it makes money—and we’re going to close the post offices because (supposedly) they don’t. If we ran the post office the same way that the health insurance mafia runs its business, it would cost five dollars a day to “subscribe” to the postal service (whether we use it or not), and then if we actually mailed something, we’d have to add a $10 co-pay just to send a postcard across town. Conversely, if we ran the health insurance industry as we run the post office, health care would be affordable to all; it would be run by the government; and it would not make any money—which is fine, because supporting the lifestyles of the rich and useless is not what health care is for.
It’s not that post offices don’t make any money; it’s that they make money for the wrong people: you and me.
It might be instructive to look at who is making the money. In the case of the post office, it’s the workers. They are paid well, and have good benefits. The government (used to) kick in a bit of subsidy to keep the operation afloat, because the postage rates do not reflect the true cost of business, and everyone benefits.
In the case of the health insurance industry, the workers do okay, but their business model has to get along without government subsidy, plus it has to pay gargantuan salaries and gargantuan bonuses to an entire class of useless, redundant, upper-level corporate management and CEO parasites, plus it has to pay out generous dividends to its equally parasitic and useless investors. So few of us can afford the actual care for which the insurance industry supposedly pays, but the insurance industry itself, as I said earlier indeed makes tons of money.
Well, the post office makes money, too. If you think you can personally deliver (or hire someone else to deliver) a letter much further than to your neighbor across the hall for 44 cents, you’re out of your mind. So, every time you mail a letter, you save money—which costs less than “making” the same amount of money, because you don’t have to commute to it or pay income tax on it.
So if you were running the government, you’d keep the post office, and sack the health insurance industry—but you’re not running the government—corporate lobbyists are. And who pays for them? Do you see why we need to close the post offices now? It’s not that they don’t make any money; it’s because they are making money for the wrong people: you and me.
Now all this is not to say that we cannot make the postal service more efficient or sensible. Perhaps maintaining a full-service post office in every town in every county, in every state in the nation is unnecessary. Even now, there is a post office in North Montpelier which is a subset of The Riverbend Country Store. I don’t know any reason that many more rural post offices could not be kept open with an “umbilical” connection to a local enterprise, library, town clerk, or even (dare I say) a church?
In the case of rural delivery, do we really need it every day, including Saturday? I live out in the middle of nowhere, and I think I could get along with deliveries to my mailbox on say, only Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And if there is a torrential nor’easter, on one of those three days, I think I could survive without my mail on such a day. They could make up that delivery on a non-delivery day which presented more reasonable weather.
If the only criterion for sustaining a public institution like the post office is whether or not it makes money, then we better close a lot of things—all our libraries, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, churches, and most of our roads and bridges—just to name a few. However, to say that we must maintain the post office in exactly it’s current form makes as much sense as saying we can’t live without Entergy Nuclear or Fairpoint. It depends entirely on whom you ask. It is my hope we ask the right ones—and heed their advice.
