What is it with conservatives and the USPS? George Will:
The fact that delivering the mail is one of the very few things the federal government does that the Constitution specifically authorizes (Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power to . . . establish post offices and post roads”) does not mean it must do it. Surely the government could cede this function to the private sector, which probably could have a satisfactory substitute system functioning quicker than you can say “FedEx,” “UPS” and “Wal-Mart.”
The first two are good at delivering things; the third, supplemented by other ubiquitous retailers, could house post offices. All three are for-profit enterprises, so they have an incentive to practice bourgeois civility — to be helpful, even polite. These attributes are not always found at post offices.
Unfortunately, privatization collides with a belief sometimes deemed reactionary but nowadays characteristic of progressives. The belief is: In government, whatever is should forever be. […]
George Will was always the low-rent William F. Buckley, but apparently he’s reached the point where even the mildest acquaintance with the facts needn’t intrude when he hits his Underwood manual to pound out a column. I went to the UPS website, and quicker than you can say “free market wanker”, found what UPS wants to charge me to send a letter to the neighboring town by Monday, something the USPS will do for 44 cents:
The “ubiquitous” Wal-Mart has 8,500 stores in the world. The Post Office has 36,000 locations in the US. You have to live in a double-reinforced titanium echo chamber not to see the difference between the USPS and UPS, FedEx and Wal-Mart.
Villago Delenda Est
Will is a good example of the kind of idiot who takes things for granted, when in fact, those things require constant effort to keep going.
Simple minded reactionary assholes. 27% of the population (including George Will) falls into that category.
Soonergrunt
They have a hard on for the USPS because the USPS is, and has historically been, a high-functioning operation of the government that performs a critical function for an exceptional price, using civil servants, the majority of whom are union members.
They hate the USPS because it’s continued existence belies everything they believe and say about the government, unions, and civil servants, and because it’s another profit opportunity they believe they are being cheated out of.
capt
George Will rot brain.
MattF
There’s just that ‘conservative’ dislike of public amenities, the constant push to impoverish any space where everyone participates on an equal footing, the assumption that the magic of the market will bestow its benefits on every one who is deserving, sooner or later.
We can make fun of Will for this, but he and his pals will always keep pushing, always keep trying to make us all poorer.
arguingwithsignposts
Wow. I like this line of argument. Congress also has the power …
Doesn’t mean it must do it.
Opens up a lot of possibilities, no?
@Canuckistani Tom: Great minds.
Canuckistani Tom
Wow.
Y’know, I thought that if it’s in the constitution, it has to be done?
Hey Georgie boy try this one on
Wanna take that back?
Amir Khalid
Plus, a private-sector entity would feel entirely within its rights to say, “We don’t want to serve region X. It’s too isolated to be profitable. If you live there and you expect postal service, tough luck.” I believe the USPS, as a constitutionally-mandated g9vernment agency, is duty bound to serve all parts of the US without exception
MikeBoyScout
Gotta luv that.
Soonergrunt
The Constitution authorizes an Army and a Navy. It doesn’t require them. In fact, the Constitution only authorizes the Army and Navy to exist for two years at a time.
If you really wanted to save the federal government money…
Odie Hugh Manatee
I bet that it’s been decades since sWill has even entered a post office.
I’m sure he has minions for that menial task.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Soonergrunt:
Gotta love the usual right-wing cherry picking of the Constitution, not unlike how they cherry pick shit out of the Old and New Testaments.
By Will’s line of thinking, we should just go ahead and outsource the Army and the Navy as well. Oh wait, we tried that in Iraq…
Keith
Since I always assume there is some deeper, more sinister purpose to radical changes that conservatives push, I am going out on a limb and say they want to sell off all that USPS real estate to build aparments or maybe gas stations. Who is the nation’s largest apartment builder, and how much does it donate to political causes?
kdaug
@Soonergrunt:
This. See also: Social Security privitization
amk
Can we euthanize twits like georgie boy and long-serving cong critters ?
Note to PC: Quarter century of meaningless pundtwitry/personal aggrandizement in reason enough to shoot those mofos through their heads, no ?
WereBear
Nice nutshelling. Even if you don’t believe in Macs. :)
I understand a lot of the troublesome legislation was funded by UPS & FedEx… who hand off a considerable portion of their deliveries to the local Post Office when a location is not “profitable enough.”
Once again, the elderly & rural Republican base are busy screwing themselves. Once the Post Office has been destroyed, who will deliver their farting slippers and seven dollar housedresses from the Carol Wright catalog then? Hmmmm?
donnah
You should send this post to George. Maybe not online, since he may not have the ability to operate a computer, but by mail. He needs to have someone explain the facts to him, since apparently the ivory tower he lives in has a moat that prevents reality from coming in.
MoeLarryAndJesus
George Will should stick to writing dull books about his favorite white baseball players.
gnomedad
Government doesn’t work! And when it works, it must be broken! Because freedom!
Gin & Tonic
I get a lot more civility, bourgeois or otherwise, from my small-town post office, which I can walk to, and where the clerks know my name and the names of my kids, than I have ever seen at the Wal-Mart, which is about 15 miles away, and where nobody knows me from Adam.
My mail deliverer will wrap my mail in a plastic bag if it’s raining, and will get out of her truck and walk up my driveway to drop things off if they’re bulky and/or it looks like they might get wet. I’m sure that’s not part of her union contract, but she does it anyway, because she lives in town, too.
Amir Khalid
@MoeLarryAndJesus:
George Will should also stay away from rock-music criticism. It should never be forgotten that he was the one who hailed Born In The USA as a “grand, cheerful affirmation”, having understood nothing that Springsteen was saying in the song, not even the chorus.
Zagloba
@Gin & Tonic: I had a graphic novel coming in via USPS a couple months back, addressed to my uni office. The adhesive on the envelope came loose and the volume fell out, never to be seen again. Except that the lone postal clerk working the Saturday evening shift noticed the empty envelope, found me in the uni directory, emailed me to ask what had been in the envelope, and looked around the station until she found the novel.
Never in a million years will I ever see that kind of humanity from the people of Wal-Mart.
Cassidy
Unmentioned is that a veterans make up a huge portion of the USPS workers, many of them disabled and retirees. These are people who already have 3 hiring strikes against them.
jon
The US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx all share resources. It’s true: they coordinate their services and sometimes even (oh, the horror!) use each others’ planes and trucks to move things more efficiently!
But in a world where Ford didn’t need the auto bailout, you can expect no disruption in FedEx or UPS services if the Postal Service gets eviscerated.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Gin & Tonic:
We’re on a first name basis at the local Post Office, my wife and daughter work with the son of one of the postal employees at their job and our delivery lady lives just down the street. We get great service and no snotty attitudes because we actually use their services instead of sending a minion out to do it.
We’re a small town George sWill, leave our Post Offices alone!
existential fish
The post office lost when it didn’t get involved in the internet.
It should be providing every American with an email address, it should be the organization pushing for rural internet access, etc.
It’s not, and so over the next 30 years or so it’s going to drastically change, if it survives at all.
j
I like this line from GW:
Just for our own edification, George, WHEN was the last time YOU ever set foot in a P.O.?
Nylund
Conservatives desire to point out any funding problems of the USPS as proof of the inefficiency of the gov’t. But the real problem is that the USPS has some really tough obligations. These include (but are not limited to) universal service at a uniform and affordable rate, as well as obligations regarding the pre-funding of pension plans.
If a privatized version of the USPS had those same obligations, there’d be no takers. It’s hard to make a profit under such rules!
I’d bet quite a bit that the pro-privatization crowd thinks that whatever private firm that took over should be free to ignore or neglect such obligations. I think this shows that the problem isn’t so much with who runs it, but what they’re obligated to do.
The argument seems to be that a private firm which provided a different and lesser service would be more profitable. That very well may be true, but it probably has a lot more to do with providing a different and lesser service than it does with the “private” aspect of it.
If you either force the private firm to uphold those same obligations or give the USPS the same “freedoms from obligations” that I suspect privatization fans would give the private company, you’d probably see the differences in profitability between the two wash away.
Heck, force ANY private company to live under the pre-funding pension rules or universal service clauses that Congress imposes on the USPS, and they’d cry bloody murder and put an army of lobbyists in place to overturn such rules.
And that right there is the unspoken truth of the privatization movement. They think private firms should be allowed to play by an easier set of rules and provide lesser services than their public counterparts. And that right there is where the cost-savings come in. It’s from the easier and lesser obligations the private firms would be granted, not anything to do with increased efficiencies or the superiority of the market.
I have no doubt that if a private firm were allowed to stop service to unprofitable rural areas or were free from the pension pre-funding rules they’d suddenly find quite a bit of profit to pay out $20 million a year to their CEO, but I don’t think that’d prove that the company was run any better.
pragmatism
Killing the public option in all of it’s forms
pragmatism
Killing the public option in all of it’s forms
Brian R.
@Cassidy:
Unmentioned by Will, of course, but I’ve been delighted to see the postal workers themselves raising this point in their ads recently.
j
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I bet he gets free postage from where he works. Is George a stamp stealer?
Schlemizel
SURPRISE! USPS delivers for UPS and FedEx. See, there isn’t enough money in the private sector to drag your package to East Bumfuck Iowa so they pay USPS to get it there.
I live in a big city so I probably wouldn’t miss USPS (except for the 2000% price increase) but you can bet your sweat ass that delivery to rural America would go the way of air travel to rural America (or the Dodo) An ass like Will would not be able to recognize the cost associated with that but he would soon be part of the chorus demanding the government save reel Merica(tm) after the damage was done.
pablo
Shit…Let those 36,000 Post Offices’ sell beer, or maybe $2.00 waffle irons, and deficit…pfft!
Thor Heyerdahl
@amk: George Will doesn’t know what to do if he hasn’t stolen the notes beforehand.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@mistermix
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
This was what I was going to say.
Who knows the price of sending a letter or a parcel when they have a secretary (earning minimum wage) to organise it for them?
arguingwithsignposts
@Sarah, Proud and Tall:
fixed.
j
@Gin & Tonic: How often do we hear about postal carriers who notice mail piling up and call the paramedics, thus saving lives? Will Wal-Mart of FedEX do that?
From personal experience I can tell you what would happen. FedEx would just put a post-it note sticker on the door that says “We were here, you weren’t, so tough shit. You can haul your lazy ass over to the truck loading depot 10 miles away and pick up your crap/medicine, or whatever. BTW, you have 3 days or we will send it back to whomever sent it.
Schlemizel
@Zagloba:
Years ago we lived in a town “St. Louis Park, MN” We got a Christmas card one year that the sender got interrupted in addressing. The got our name & address but stopped at St. Lo” Yes, it went to Missouri first but it got to us before Xmas – that took someone at the post office actually caring about the card.
FedEx refused to deliver a package to me because the sender got the street number off by 2. They would not allow me to pick it up at the office (they called to tell me they wouldn’t) – it had to go back to the sender because they had not arranged for a change before the sent it.
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@arguingwithsignposts:
I stand corrected.
Mnemosyne
@Schlemizel:
It ain’t just East Bumfuck. I live in the middle of Los Angeles, only a few miles from downtown, and my free shipping UPS or FedEx@Home packages are often delivered by USPS.
Jennifer
@existential fish: Sure, as soon as you can figure out how amazon can deliver products via email. (Don’t say “kindle”; they sell a lot more than books.)
There’s no way a private company could operate more efficiently than the PO while providing the same level of service, for the simple reason of profit. Private companies gotta make it, otherwise no one will invest in them. And these days, they’re expected to make over 20%, quarter in and quarter out, so already, you’ve increased the cost of sending a first class letter by $.10 or more, just so some shareholders can pocket some profit. Then you get into the whole “Wyoming isn’t profitable so we aren’t gonna provide service there” or “we can’t provide service to Wyoming for the same price we provide it in NYC, so for you Wyoming folks, your rate for first class letters is now $5.00.”
Then we get into the whole issue of monopolies. Whoever takes over the functions of the post office has one; either that, or they’ve got a regional one. Otherwise, you’ve got multiple oompeting postal services serving profitable areas like NYC; how does that work? Suppose I send my letter from Little Rock via American Postal Services but they don’t operate in NYC. So it’s got to be handed off to Northeastern Postal Services or whoever else handles that specific NYC address. How does that increas “efficiency” or lower cost? Answer: it doesn’t. Looking again at the urban competition problem, if you’ve got 5 carriers all trying to serve all addresses in the same urban region, you’re wasting SCADS of money, because you have no guarantee that all customers in the area have to ship via your company; you also have no guarantee that incoming mail is going to be designated to be delivered by your company. And who pays you for delivering my mail? I paid the company I sent it through, so now you’ve got to collect from them to deliver it.
So, your choices boil down to: set up a national monopoly for one company, or settle for much less efficiency and higher costs. To be fair, you’ll get higher costs with either. What you won’t get is anything that functions with anything like the 99.99% efficiency we see from USPS, where a couple of weeks ago I got a letter mailed from fricken’ Whitefish, Montana a mere 2 days after it was dropped in the box…for the price of $.44.
I think it’s safe to say that, like in all else, instead of thinking through his thesis, Will is yanking his taffy here. Just another example of why the WaPo needs to go out of business.
Kathy
A few weeks ago I (who live in eastern South Dakota) drove to a wedding in Buffalo, WY. There’s a helluva a lot of empty between here and there. Interstate exits are for towns 10 or 20 miles away or isolated ranches. During that long drive I had plenty of time to contemplate.
We, the private individuals, will not save the USPS. We don’t have the clout to fight for our 44 cent letter. It’s the corporations who will save the USPS. Look at the mail you get every day. Most of it is from some corporate or business entity. No way are they going to pay UPS rates to fill the mailboxes of Box Elder, SD or Moorcroft, WY or the gazillion rural addresses.
bin Lurkin'
A neighbor of mine is a postal inspector, I had heard that well over half of UPS and FedEx deliveries actually route through the USPS system so I asked her if this is true and she confirmed that it is indeed so.
Without the USPS both FedEx and UPS would be overwhelmed by volume that they simply are not equipped to handle.
Liberty60
@Nylund:
USPS is a quasi-governmental agency with a unionized force;
UPS is a private corporation with a unionized force;
Fed Ex is a private corporation with a nonunionized force.
Yet, for the most part, all three are highly competitive with each other in terms of price and service.
So for sockulists and glibertarians alike, this reality shreds their precious theories about some superior ideology
Villago Delenda Est
They hate the Commons. They hate the masses. They desperately wish for a return to the good old days of feudalism, when the rabble knew its place, and was kept there by security goons.
Assholes like Will are why tumbrels are employed, on occasion.
kay
I love that SPT uses the word “parcel” (rather than “package”).
That’s what the pros use :)
Rural people love the USPS and they’re all GOP voters.
I get such a kick out of the fact that conservative pundits know nothing about conservative voters.
WereBear
Psychologically speaking, when you have to crush the hopes and dreams of millions to feel superior in some way… you gotta problem.
j
@Schlemizel: @Schlemizel: Years ago when my family was moving to a suburban hell hole tract housing development in a former corn field an appliance store sent a letter to us but didn’t know the address. They just wrote the delivery directions on the envelope, and it got to us w/ 3 days.
But THAT doesn’t compare to what happened to football coach Duffy Daugherty. He coached an important game to a TIE (when a win would have earned them a championship). Some irate fan a hundred miles away was so mad he wrote a letter to him and simply wrote “Duffy the Dope” on the envelope.
The letter made it right to Duffy’s mailbox at his house, so SOMEONE at each of several POs knew what to do.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,834578,00.html
kay
Can I write an ill-informed screed on the syndicated opinion columns business?
I don’t know anything about it, but I have ideas I’d like to share!
Joel
@Liberty60: Regular mail and ubiquity are two things that USPS has that the other parcel delivery services lack. Not exactly apples to apples, but close enough, I suppose.
muddy
To support the Postal Service, I have switched back from paying bills online to using stamps. I figure this is good in 2 ways, buying the stamps, plus if enough people did this the corporations would have to hire more people to handle your bill and check. They can scarcely outsource that. I have been encouraging people I know to do the same. It is not as convenient, but I look at it as a form of “buying local”.
Also I think junk mail etc ought to cost the same as what regular mail for people costs. My mail carrier says that they need that revenue even if it is inequitable per item. I say that the savings on planes, trucks and gas$ might make it so you didn’t need to grab for the pennies. The PO was doing fine before there was such a huge amount of mail that goes straight into the recycling.
balthan
The USPS should be the poster child for conservative “good government”.
It is:
1. Explicitly constitutional
2. Funded solely by fee-for-service (no general taxes)
3. Self-sufficient (apart from the ridiculous requirement to pre-fund retiree health care for the next 75 years)
Privatizing the USPS should be at the very bottom of the list of priorities.
gttim
#27 nailed it! Universal delivery! No for profit company would agree to that, nationwide. They would only want to do the dense (blue) areas and not the fly-over (red) areas. Do they want to pay $10 a letter? Delivered by minimum wage drones who really do not care?
Amir Khalid
@kay:
Go for it. Complete ignorance of their subject doesn’t stop those syndicated columnists from opening their yaps. So why should it stop you? ;)
ppcli
“All three are for-profit enterprises, so they have an incentive to practice bourgeois civility — to be helpful, even polite. These attributes are not always found at post offices.”
Ah, Georgie Will. I remember when I moved to the US 27 years ago. During the Reagan-Mondale election. Reagan performed abysmally in the first debate – badly enough to raise genuine doubts that he might be losing cognitive function. Doubts that we now know were absolutely warranted, and that people around him were scrambling to cover in the last years of his Presidency. So how did the Reagan people address this? Call in George Will (and lots of other people of course) who advised him to address the worries by making a joke. “I don’t want to see age to become an issue. I’m not going to try to take advantage of my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” A joke that was older than Reagan, of course, but no matter. Then immediately after the debate, he appears on some ABC talking heads show and without disclosing his role, states authoritatively that “With that quip, Reagan put an end to age as an issue.” (Don’t recall the exact words.) Really George? The mental decay of someone we now know to have been approaching (or perhaps already in the grip of) the early stages of Alzheimers is shrugged off so easily? Apparently so, because the meme stuck.
And so what a surprise to find this intellectually (and every other way too) dishonest fraud pushing a favorite right wing zombie lie. The awful post office. From someone who has, in the last thirty years, set foot in a post office a number of times that is undoubtedly within epsilon of zero. Here’s a genuine fact, Mr. Will – In the nearly 30 years since I moved to this country, I’ve been to dozens of post offices on hundreds of occasions, and interacted with dozens of mailmen brining mail to my house. I have never once been greeted with anything but good humor and helpfulness. I am confident that whenever I go to the USPS I will come away satisfied, or at least in possession of a solid explanation, patiently presented, of why my request can’t be satisfied. I could, on the other hand, fill a large notebook with absolutely infuriating experiences with huge private sector retail organizations.
But in fact, this isn’t, I think, where these guys are pressing, though USPS as a whole is the initial, tactical target. UPS and FedEx would be horrified to see what amounts to a federal subsidy for rural deliveries go away. What they are pressing for is the disappearance of the USPS from all the most profitable and high-traffic areas. UPS, Fedex and Wal-Mart will happily skim the cream off the top. A reduced USPS will still have an obligation to service all the rural areas, high crime areas, etc., taking those packages off UPS/Fedex/ Etc.’s hands.
Because that’s what free enterprise means to the establishment conservative of today – privatise the profits, socialise the losses.
kay
Also, when I worked at the PO we dealt w/ Fed Ex and UPS every day and UPS was better. More professional.
Fed Ex employees are disgruntled. They all wanted my job, to the point where they would ask how to get my job, while doing their job.
An unhappy resentful crew, on the whole, compared to UPS drivers.
Also. Many many people think UPS is a public delivery service. Amazing but true. They think it’s the parcel part of the USPS.
Amanda in the South Bay
@kay:
Or…they know that conservative rural voters are stupid enough to vote against their own interests? Social conservatism/class warfare trumps all?
Basilisc
I know we’re not supposed to look at how foreign countries do things, since they’re all either socialist or Islamist or both, but here in Switzerland (where I live), post offices are clean, well staffed, & often open on Saturdays. Along with postal stuff they also sell stationery, prepaid cellphones, books. Letters get delivered within the country a day later if you buy a “priority” stamp, or maybe two-three days later if you get an “economy” stamp. Mail to the US usually takes maybe four days. And the postal service is also a bank, offering dependable, low/no fee savings, checking, billpaying, & mutual funds. And it runs a profit.
How do they do this? Well, a society-wide respect for public services and public servants is part of it, but mainly it’s that they price at or close to market. A domestic “priority” letter costs about $1.20, “economy” costs $1.
Would I pay these prices for comparable service in the US? Absolutely. Would most people? Probably, if they knew what they were missing. But of course every time the USPS begs to be allowed to raise their prices even a tiny bit it’s time to call them socialist. Sorry, guys, you get what you pay for.
Jeffro
@Soonergrunt: Dit-to on all points.
AnotherBruce
Just because George Will can write ignorant idiotic columns doesn’t mean he has to do it.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Soonergrunt:
Actually it only authorizes armies for two years, but requires maintaining a Navy. (Former sailor here.)
arguingwithsignposts
@kay:
That’s partly because FE has “contract” delivery drivers, who have to pay for their own vans, health care, etc. They are “outsourcing” their delivery like companies franchise their stores.
Gex
I’m almost to the point where I say let ’em. Apparently old people in rural areas are tired of us urban elite lie-bruls subsidizing their connections to the rest of the world.
I’m sure the added benefit of privatizing the post is that they can get UPS and FedEx to help them rig mail in ballots too.
Basilisc
(reposted because the earlier one is caught in “awaiting moderation” purgatory)
I know we’re not supposed to look at how foreign countries do things, since they’re all either socialist or Islamist or both, but here in Switzerland (where I live), post offices are clean, well staffed, & often open on Saturdays. Along with postal stuff they also sell stationery, prepaid cellphones, books. Letters get delivered within the country a day later if you buy a “priority” stamp, or maybe two-three days later if you get an “economy” stamp. Mail to the US usually takes maybe four days. And the postal service is also a bank, offering dependable, low/no fee savings, checking, billpaying, & mutual funds. And it runs a profit.
How do they do this? Well, a society-wide respect for public services and public servants is part of it, but mainly it’s that they price at or close to market. A domestic “priority” letter costs about $1.20, “economy” costs $1.
Would I pay these prices for comparable service in the US? Absolutely. Would most people? Probably, if they knew what they were missing. But of course every time the USPS begs to be allowed to raise their prices even a tiny bit it’s time to call them socialist. Sorry, guys, you get what you pay for.
Denny
@donnah:
Your mistake here is the assumption that George Will cares at all about facts. He has an ideological ax to grind and nothing is going to stop him, facts be damned.
He and the other conservative hucksters are like the underpants gnomes but instead of stealing underpants and expecting profits they preach privatization and expect lower costs – well, actually I’m not convinced that they expect lower costs, they just expect further profit opportunities for the oligarchs and plutocrats that pay them the large stipends to be shills.
kay
Arguing:
I know some of that about Fed Ex people because they’d stand there and complain about the company.
I was symphathetic to their complaints, but the contrast w/ UPS drivers was stark.
UPS drivers don’t hang around. They’re there and then they’re gone.
My husband drove for UPS before he was a lawyer and he was quite proud of his “on time” record :)
Denny
@Liberty60:
Where do you get that UPS and FedEx are equivalent to the USPS in price and service? As Mistermix noted in OP the cost of mailing a letter to the next town via UPS or FexEx is astronomical while I can mail a letter literally across the country for $0.44. Following Mistermix’s lead I got a quote from UPS to send a letter from where I live in San Diego to my wife’s aunt about 100miles up the road in Norco,CA and the cheapest rate I could find was for $12.50 for second day delivery. If I dropped a letter in the mail with a $0.44 stamp today it would be in their mailbox by Monday afternoon so delivery time cut in half for less than 5% of the cost, yeah that’s equivalent service.
dmsilev
My favorite postal delivery story happened to someone at Fermilab. When the lab was built, the majority of the facility was (and is) underground, with a big admin building being the major above-ground feature. Until suburban sprawl reached the area, there wasn’t much around the lab. So, someone there once got a letter addressed as:
Dr. Smith
Big White Building in the Middle of Nowhere
and the right ZIP code.
Denny
@arguingwithsignposts:
The FedEx drivers get paid by the package that they deliver.
My wife found this out a few weeks ago when we had a package delivered to the house that required a signature and the driver rang the bell but in the time it took her to literally walk about 45 feet and down one flight of stairs he had already put the “you weren’t here” post-it on the door and driven off (30 seconds, tops).
The customer service person she called claimed surprise because they are paid by the package; however I see that as making perfect sense – every second that the driver is standing in front of the door waiting for someone to show up that might not be there is a second that he’s not using to drop off a package that doesn’t need a signature that he can get credit for instantly. I imagine that most drivers are filling out the post-it note for signature required items as they are walking to the door so that unless you’re standing right by the door to open and accept they can be on their way in as short a time as possible.
Gretchen
@j: I’m betting he’s been in a post office more recently than a Wal-Mart.
Jay C
Well, there’s a reason rote-hackery columns like Will’s are called “thumbsuckers”; it’s just about the level of intellectual engagement they attain: George gives the game away, here (IMO) with the phrase “bourgeois civility”. Most likely his refined sensibilities of ivory-tower gentility were recently tweaked by some (working-class, unionized, probably melanin-enhanced) postal clerk – maybe she made fun of his bow tie, who knows? – prompting this stock, off-the-shelf blather.
Of course, a lot of the quality-of-service one gets from the USPS depends on where you are: we live in New York City and have a summer house in rural MA. The folks at the small-town PO are as “civil”, “helpful” and “polite” as you could wish – AND yes, handle a considerable amount of UPS and FedEx business, too – the personnel in NYC, well; not so much…
But our mail and packages still get delivered 6 days a week: and for a reasonable cost.
Mike in NC
So apparently George Shrill visited a post office in 1989 and not only had to deal with overpaid unionized thugs, but they were rude to him. The horror!
ET
With his big-city bias he fails to understand that for profit companies won’t (in theory) do things that aren’t profitable and very rural delivery (hint most of Alaska and a few other states) won’t be profitable and so will the US government force these companies to deliver to these areas if this function in contracted out?
He may feel that just because the Constitution says the government is to do something that it doesn’t mean it should however, just because the government can contract out something doesn’t mean it should either.
Typically for many people (conservative and otherwise) what looks “easy” rapidly gets more complicated once someone bothers to look deeper and educate themselves. It is obvious that George Will and others that advocate this haven’t bothered beyond sitting down at a typewriter and typing, because if they did they wouldn’t type shit like this obviously ill-conceived thought.
Linda
Fred Smith, founder of Fedex, when asked if his firm could take over the functions of the U.S. mail, said a flat “no.” He said that they didn’t have the size to do what the Postal Service does.
It’s the usual right-wing scam: nag people into quitting a public function and turning it over the the private sector, because it’s “cheaper” and “more efficient.” In fact, it’s almost always more expensive. I don’t know a single private trash collection that’s cheaper than the public system it replaced, but people love them anyway.
Linda
ET:
“With his big-city bias he fails to understand that for profit companies won’t (in theory) do things that aren’t profitable and very rural delivery (hint most of Alaska and a few other states) won’t be profitable and so will the US government force these companies to deliver to these areas if this function in contracted out?”
Silly billy! Ask all the small and medium sized towns that no longer have air service after airlines were deregulated.
Svensker
@j:
Also, too, ever tried to contact a UPS central station? Or get them to help you with a package? Not to mention how friendly the clerks are at Wal-Mart.
Villago Delenda Est
@ET:
Well, there’s you’re problem. George Will knows everything. He’s a patrician Cliff Clavern. The know it all who knows nothing, actually.
AA+ Bonds
It’s a fair enough observation by Will: in America, the left works to preserve society, while the right seeks to radically alter it and, y’know, just see what happens!
George Will thinks clerks at Wal-Mart and FedEx/Kinkos are unfailingly polite because George Will doesn’t go into normal people stores to buy normal people stuff, he sends his man out there with the limo I suppose and then fantasizes about the bourgeois civility that his servants must be experiencing
dmsilev
@Svensker:
Oh Dear Lord, this. Calling up UPS to deal with a misaddressed package was like a cross between Kafka and Orwell. By contrast, the last time I had to call the Post Office’s central customer service number, the first person I talked to was able to answer 90% of my question, and properly referred me to my local PO to get the remainder answered. Who were also very helpful over the phone.
AA+ Bonds
George Will despises America, is what I’m saying
AA+ Bonds
You know what we need to do? Wreck the lines of guaranteed internal communication in the United States, after all, nothing bad ever happens INSIDE a country
AA+ Bonds
George Will is shit
Fax Paladin
Grew up in small-town Marfa, Texas; went to college at UT-Austin, as did my best friend from high school. Once, as an experiment, he wrote home using as the entirety of the address “Mom 79843,” giving his full return address.
It got delivered, though the postmaster did ask his mom to pass along a request not to do that again.
kay
@arguingwithsignposts:
This was a while ago, and the USPS was only doing the “last (unprofitable) mile” for private delivery services in rural areas, so a very limited role.
I imagine the connection between the USPS and the private companies is much tighter now. I saw Amazon has a sort of UPS/USPS hybrid deal on parcels now, which wasn’t true when I worked for the USPS.
I do think it’s funny that Will doesn’t have a sense for the SIZE of this country, and how there are vast nearly empty spaces, and how it might be impractical or unprofitable to cover all that ground in a truck.
I always wonder about that with conservatives. They do know they represent the areas of the country with very few people per mile, right? They know that? Do they ever, you know, look at a MAP? Think about the Senate, and how there are whole states with the population of a congressional district? This has to have occurred to them. When they go after federal programs that primarily benefit the people they’re always babbling about as “real Americans” do they ever think that through?
I thought Sarah Palin’s candidacy did serve one minor useful role because we finally talked about how states like hers are essentially “federal” in nature, no matter how much they deny it :)
kay
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I don’t really believe in the “What’s the Matter with Kansas” political theory. I think it’s much more pragmatic than that. I think social conservatives who benefit from federal programs and federal largess lobby and protect their interests on those specific issues. They do both things. They vote for social conservatives and then they fight like hell to protect the “benefits” that they themselves receive. Effortlessly. Without angst or a sense that it’s hypocritical to be a “small government” person who lobbies for farm subsidies.
They think they can have both. Most of the time, they’re right. They can have both! They can have the services that benefit them and they can stop people from getting married. We know this, right? Because “conservatives” in Congress deliver federal bennies to “their” voters all the time. How are they voting against their own interests? They’re just making sure you don’t get any federal benefits, because you don’t deserve them, and they do.
AA+ Bonds
I just got back from the Post Office, where a polite mail clerk helped me send a letter on Saturday, holy shit
I was thinking this over and so . . . did George Will just admit a Marxist class analysis?
Because his fantasies of enforced “bourgeois civility” at Wal-Mart sound a whole lot like surplus repression. Of course, he gets the analysis all wrong and concludes that a notable inefficiency in capitalism actually demonstrates efficiency. Other commenters above have shown the material folly of this.
PIGL
@MikeBoyScout: as opposed to, for example, proletarian kalashnikovs, or machetes, or piano wire.
I will probably rot in hell as punishement for how much I have always hated George Will, and it will be worth it.
Anonymous At Work
The conservative obsession is easy. If it appears like a business, even if it is doing government work, it must turn a profit. However, those same conservatives also have (mostly) rural areas that aren’t served by UPS, Fed Ex, et alia, so they also demand that USPS serve their constituents. This is the disconnect: Make a profit by playing by my rules, not yours.
Mnemosyne
I will admit that I’m kind of pissed off at my local post office right now because they changed their hours due to budget cuts (okay) but didn’t bother to inform their customers (gah!) I didn’t find this out until I went to the Post Office to pick up a package at the stated opening time of 8:30 am, only to discover they now don’t open until 10:00 am. Best of all, there was absolutely no way for me to know this until I actually arrived because the USPS website still had the wrong information. So not only did I call the national office and file a complaint, I also complained to the manager when I went back at lunchtime to try again to pick the package up.
And the worst part is that it was all Werebear’s fault — the box that she sent my Variety Sampler in was slightly too big for my mailbox and the carrier didn’t want to leave it on my doorstep.
(They’re not big on the Royal Nip, but Keaton repeatedly punched Charlotte in the head when she tried to take the Stinky Sock from him, so that was definitely a winner.)
gene108
Has George Will shopped at Wal-Mart? Customer service is pretty non-existent.
Folks at the Post Office are pretty decent, even when all the cutbacks has clearly left the Post Office understaffed, i.e. lines are getting longer.
I’d rather deal with an adult at the Post Office, than a teenager at Wal-Mart.
Brachiator
@Soonergrunt:
The post office is dying. If the USPS were a newspaper publisher, a bookstore, an old media company, people would be mocking its clumsy attempts to stay current.
What is its critical function, apart from the delivery of junk mail, and maybe the holiday package shipping?
And I’m curious. Have other Balloon Juicers not noticed any of the recent changes in postal service operations? Where I live in California, post boxes have been removed, a couple of post offices moved to less desirable locations further away from convenient traffic, and PO box access has been cut back dramatically.
The delivery of first class mail continues to slow to nothing, displaced by email and texting. Package delivery is good, but has to deal with intense competition from various companies.
The attacks on the post office from conservative pundits is definitely a case of piling on. But the bottom line is that the postal service is as much a victim of technological progress as other businesses.
For example, when was the last time any of you sent a telegram?
Why people cannot admit that public institutions are affected by technological innovation a much as private businesses amazes me.
AA+ Bonds
@Brachiator:
This seems standard fare for you – you’re the type who believes that every convenience we have will always exist into perpetuity at the same rate, so we should deprecate alternatives, in direct opposition to national interest. A George Will type.
AA+ Bonds
Yes let’s treat the national mail like a business because God knows the only thing it does for a country to have guaranteed lines of physical communication is MAKE IT MONEY
Linda
Brachiator:
I’d be o.k. with the end of the post office if there were some electronic equivalent that served rural, poor, and off the mainstream grid people, but they are essentially it.
AA+ Bonds
“Hey, I can email you now! We should rip up the Interstate Highway System and also we should sew our mouths shut to save oxygen.”
AA+ Bonds
@Linda:
Yeah so what happens when the Russians bust an EMP in the lower atmosphere over the West Coast? Or the Chinese run DOS attacks on every Stateside server?
I really encourage Americans to understand that they live within history, the dance of hostile nation-states, and not outside of it. The desire to eliminate the USPS demonstrates incredible myopia that could kill many Americans at a time of crisis – it’s like defunding the CDC.
The sad thing is that folks like Will consider themselves IR realists.
Lex
Not only do private carriers not deliver to a lot of rural and/or isolated places, they often contract with — wait for it — the USPS to do that “last mile” delivery for them. Will has always been an ass; these days he’s just adding idiocy to the mix.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Actually, measured strictly by the business they do, the USPS does pretty well. Ordinary first-class mail is way down, but they are able to make up for it with internet orders from places like Amazon.com that primarily use USPS for their free shipping.
The main problem for the Post Office right now is that they’ve been burdened by Congress with onerous pension requirements that meant they were forced to overpay $6.9 billion for future pensions:
Basically, Republicans have been tying weights to their feet but the USPS has actually done a pretty good job of adapting to current circumstances. It’s their having to set billions of dollars aside for pensions they don’t actually owe that’s putting them in financial trouble.
PIGL
@AA+ Bonds: but don’t you see? Hip and au courant. And tehno-fetishest, which every one needs to get with the program. Too bad it’s the same as Georgie’s. Because progress == capital accumulation == colonisation of very aspect of life == inevitable == There Is No Alternative.
Snarla
One year my postal carrier delivered a package on a Sunday, which was Christmas day. I was flabbergasted.
I love the USPS.
El Cruzado
Apparently the last time George Will went to the post office (back when Ronald Reagan was starring in B-series movies) he wasn’t treated with the deference deserved by a True Member of the Overclass.
He’s been secretly holding a grudge since.
Brachiator
@AA+ Bonds:
You either have not read my past posts, or do not understand them. People who try to predict change, or the impact of technological change, are morans. I certainly don’t believe that anything will always exist into perpetuity, period.
@Mnemosyne:
Just not true. Let’s look at third quarter results:
I agree with you about the pension issue.
@Linda:
Just as the phone company is currently required to offer lifeline service for low income people, there is a need for equivalent with respect to postal service.
Oddly enough, the Interstate Highway system killed some smaller communities which had been accessible by the older road system. And there was a time when Greyhound and Continental Trailways, along with a more extensive passenger rail system, connected communities. When was the last time any Balloon Juicer took a long distance trip on a bus in the US?
On the other hand, even in the age of the InterTubes, the number of licensed Ham operators is increasing. Technology is funny like that.
mellowjohn
george will is also a cubs fan, as if i needed any more proof that he’s a fucking idiot.
Brachiator
@AA+ Bonds:
You’re either confusing me with someone else, or just making stuff up. And you either have not read my past posts, or do not understand them. People who try to predict change, or the impact of technological change, are morans. I certainly don’t believe that anything will always exist into perpetuity, period.
Oddly enough, the Interstate Highway system killed some smaller communities which had been accessible by the older road system. And there was a time when Greyhound and Continental Trailways, along with a more extensive passenger rail system, connected communities. When was the last time any Balloon Juicer took a long distance trip on a bus in the US?
On the other hand, even in the age of the InterTubes, the number of licensed Ham operators is increasing.
Technology is funny like that.
ETA: Moderation is frustrating as all heck.
Anne Laurie
@WereBear:
Forget that, who will deliver their “free”-via-Medicare diabetes test strips, blood pressure pills, and other medical necessities?
Since I don’t drive, I’m very grateful my health center will ship prescriptions right to my door, via USPS, because it saves me cab fare and the trip. But I live within a few miles of several pharmacies, and fortunately the transportation fee would be a nuisance but not a budget-breaker. The “get the USPS outta my taxes” elders Will is trying to defraud have a lot more to lose!
kay
@Snarla:
That was sort of fun because a person might wear a santa hat and feel both put-upon and saintly, at the same time.
If one were the sort of person who wears santa hats, which I’m not. I did feel saintly, however :)
Stoic, trudging along, looking at the lights in the windows…maybe softly singing a Christmas carol.
Kathleen
@Soonergrunt: Also, too, I’m sure the privatizers want to get their hooves on that pension money.
Ruckus
@kay:
It looks like anyone can write crap.(Looks in mirror) Getting it published in print seems to require a level of crassness and bullshit that most people I’ve ever known can’t muster. At least not on a regular basis. They must have some sort of gene deficiency that only newspaper editors recognize. And even the editors can’t get that right all the time, see example, Krugman,
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@Amir Khalid: Like RFD? I don’t think UPS or Fed Ex is interested, or in hauling 4th class “junk mail” either. What saps.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Your link is from 2001. Here’s some 2011 information. They still had a loss because first-class mail business continues to shrink, but:
So the growth of parcel mail is not yet making up for the loss of first-class mail, but it could if the USPS were allowed to make changes that Congress is currently blocking.
Again, the problem isn’t the USPS business model per se. It’s that Congress dictates the business model and the USPS has to go along, and then Congress complains that the business model that they dictated isn’t working.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
Ol’ Mom’s hearing aid was repaired in Indiana (I sent it via the USPS and it arrived there in 2 days) and returned to Florida via Fed Ex also in 2 or 3 days. At 3X the cost. Unfortunately, Dear Ol’ Mom, at 93, neither hears anything without this little jewel, nor can she walk very fast. So Fed Ex left a note with an address for pick-up because she could not answer the door fast enough. I attempted to go to the address, but absolutely could not find the place, and I’ve lived here for 42 years. After calling Fed Ex several times, somebody attempted to give me directions. It was located on a street/avenue crossing that you absolutely could not get to from either road. You needed to take OTHER streets in order to find the address listed which covered a single block buried deep behind some industrial park on the isolated outskirts of the big town some miles south of us. We live in a little village here in south Florida with two (count ’em, TWO) Post Offices nearby. George Will is a blithering as***le.
Donald G
@AnotherBruce:
Are we certain that he does? Isn’t that what interns and “research assistants” are for?
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
Yikes. Sorry about that. The other links i found were pdfs, and I didn’t notice the date for the text related link. But, as you acknowledge, the postal service is still losing money.
Could be. But it is likely that there would still be a serious contraction of their overall operations, and massive layoffs, if the USPS became more parcel focused.
Actually, this sounds like both a problem with the business model and with Congress’ ability to refocus what USPS does. There was a time, in both the US and the UK, when you could mail a letter in the morning, and get a reply in the late afternoon in the big cities. That kind of service, by mail, has simply disappeared, and been replaced by email and the telephone. The part of the USPS business model based on the delivery of personal letters and post cards, has evaporated.
Comrade Luke
@AA+ Bonds:
Seems like we can close the comments now. What else is there to say?
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Here’s the thing though — Will isn’t complaining about the $200 million or so the Post Office is losing as they transition from having their primary business be letters to having it be parcels. He’s complaining about the $5 billion that they’re “losing” because the pension obligations imposed on them by Congress requires them to set that money aside. If they didn’t have to deal with that BS, they could concentrate on re-directing their business.
As other people have pointed out, there is no private company that will deliver letters and parcels to rural areas. The ones who claim to do it now, UPS and FedEx, contract with the USPS to do it for them. UPS and FedEx just do not have the infrastructure necessary to replace what the USPS does and still wouldn’t have it even if first class mail went away completely and everyone only did parcels.
So, no, the USPS will not “naturally” die out because they are still the best-equipped to make rural deliveries of parcels and it would take years, if not a decade, for UPS and FedEx to catch up. It will have to be killed for Will’s private mail delivery utopia to come into being. And don’t think he doesn’t know that.
Svensker
@Ronzoni Rigatoni:
But, see, old George Will’s assistant just has the driver go pick things up at FedEx, so what’s the problem? Doesn’t your mother’s assistant have the driver do it?
Gin & Tonic
@Brachiator:
How do you define “long distance”? I took an inter-city bus trip not more than a couple of weeks ago. Buses are huge these days in the East – Bolt, Megabus, the various Chinatown buses. They’re growing like crazy, and they’re packed most of the time. Now true, very few people will take a bus from Chicago to LA, but the 3,4,5-hour market is enormous. If you’re going, say, NYC to DC or Boston, the market that used to be owned by the “air shuttle” (remember Eastern Airlines?), your total elapsed time is likely to be equal or better on the bus.
henqiguai
@Brachiator (#104):
Haven’t done much in the way of road trips lately, but up here in New England, long-haul buses are all over the highways. My office is situated right across a pond from a local hotspot Radisson in Nashua, NH; place is always crawling with buses coming in from across the region.
And as Gin & Tonic is saying in #117, anything under 5 hours is likely to be quicker on a bus than a plane, even assuming you can find air service to wherever you’re going.
JGabriel
George Will:
Right. Tell that to Verizon, jackass.
.
JGabriel
@Brachiator:
I’ll be doing it in four weeks. I do it every year, the Christmas trip from NYC to visit family in Pennsyltucky, Soft Coal Division.
.
Linda
–Brachiator:
You pointed out that there could be an equivalent institution to provide internet access to the poor, as there is one to provide low-cost phone service. Of course, Will and his buds are proposing nothing like that. And, weirdly enough, there are news stories popping up about corruption and misspending
in the phone support service to the poor. Which is a right-wing prelude to a push to get rid of them…
PhoenixRising
@Liberty60:
If I had a truck that could haul the weight that “for the most part” is carrying in that sentence, I’d start shipping freight myself.
–luv,
Reel Murikan whose mama and internet vendors BOTH use USPS to get stuff delivered to my door in the heart of Nowheresville
Brachiator
@JGabriel:
This is fantasy capitalism. In the real world, you have companies that decide that customer service is unprofitable, and assume that they will lose a certain amount of customers due to bad service or performance. Other companies deliberately erect barriers, forcing customers to either make a huge effort to get customer service, or die trying.
@Linda:
Will is wrong, and his proposals stupid. But this nostalgia about the postal service is about as helpful as nostalgia about the great age of passenger rail in this country.
It’s odd. There was a little concern about the impact of the shift to digital broadcast on poor communities, but I also recall a whiff of elitism even here on Balloon Juice, the idea that if people could not afford cable, like a right thinking American, well, tough. And the shift to cell phones is going to make maintenance of land lines economically unsustainable in the near future, and again poor and rural communities may be more greatly affected than others. And yet, people seem willing to accept these changes, and whatever hardships occur.
Will’s arguments don’t interest me, but it provides a good jumping off point. The postal service was originally founded on the idea that maintaining business and personal communication between all citizens was a public value. And originally a larger portion of the country was rural. But much of the postal service’s mission is now fulfilled by other methods.
Where we used to have bus lines that provided service all across the US, the great national carriers, Greyhound and Continental have gone away, and been replaced by regional carriers. There are still crowds at Los Angeles Union Station taking trains during the holidays and at other times, but this is a fraction of the service that used to go out from the station.
At some point, Congress is going to have to consider re-establishing the postal service as a smaller, leaner operation that concentrates on what it can do, and what it needs to do more effectively. This may be parcels, rural and safety net service. George Will’s reveries are a waste of time. However, no matter how you slice it, the postal service is going to have to retool itself as a substantially smaller operation, if it does not go away entirely.
karen marie
@Amir Khalid: Well, they would get around it by charging such an exorbitant amount that people would rarely use it. Technically, mail service would be available, it wouldn’t be the corporation’s fault if you couldn’t afford the service. Kind of like insurance companies and health care.
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: He’s not even making an argument that the costs are outrageous, just that the postal workers are not polite enough.
I suppose that’s code for “they’re union and not scared enough of losing their job and, being common workers, they shouldn’t have pension or decent health care benefits.”
Linda
@Brachiator:
No, I’m not nostalgic about the USPS, just realistic about what would happen if they were gone. Right now, there are services that would fill in most services for affluent, urban Americans if the price were right, but nothing will do that for people in the inner city or rural areas. In the olden days (30 years ago, say), conservatives would have been happy to let the government provide services to those areas as long as private enterprise could take the most profitable business, which would be o.k.
But the trend now is to not let the government do anything, even if nobody else wants to do it. Private companies are digging in their heels about sharing information that could lead to more high-speed internet services in areas they have no intention of covering. If a “safety net” were in place BEFORE we let the post office wither into a leaner operation, I wouldn’t have a problem.
Nancy Irving
I don’t know about FedEx, but UPS’s “bourgeois civility” does not extend to small shippers. I had one customer who refused to ship by the Post Office, so I had to deal with UPS several times. They lost parts of shipments almost as many times as there were shipments, I had to drive forty minutes there and back to go to the UPS depot to try to sort things out, and when I got there I have NEVER experienced such rudeness in any business transaction as I did there. They treat the big shippers nice though, I hear.
I believe this is intentional on their part, as they do not want to deal with small shippers, as they are not profitable enough. The bad service, rudeness and waste of time turns small shippers off, and they take their business to the Post Office, which then gets all the marginal and unprofitable business.
I don’t think UPS would want to see the Post Office go under. Then they’d have to deal with all us plebes.
Nancy Irving
@Mnemosyne: It would help if the PO got rid of Media Mail. I don’t know if that’s a PO decision or whether Congress would have to okay it.
Media Mail (for books, videos, CDs etc.) is WAY too cheap and should be phased out in favor of Priority Mail, which is fairly-priced. A huge volume of media shipments made by independent sellers through Amazon and other web sites are shipped via Media Mail, and the PO must lose a lot of money that way. Yes, they might lose some volume on the low end, but I wonder how much, if anything, they make on a Media Mail package. Media Mail was originally intended to be a public service–to facilitate the circulation of books in a mostly-rural nation before many people even had access to public libraries. Things have changed, and I don’t think we need to subsidize this anymore.
Canning Media Mail would not only increase PO parcel revenues, it could save some of the used-book stores who can’t compete with grans and gramps making pin-money by selling crap copies of used books on Amazon for a penny plus a four-dollar shipping fee they can charge only because of rock-bottom Media Mail costs. If sellers of used books on Amazon and elsewhere had to charge a reasonable shipping fee (more like six or seven dollars), bookstores could continue to compete. (If the Kindle etc. don’t kill them anyway.) To a lesser extent this affects all brick-and-mortars selling new or used books, CDs and videos. These stores are already at a disadvantage vis-a-vis sales tax, which is not charged on many online transactions, with the connivance of state legislatures. Why should the government subsidize online retail at the expense of Main Street? Soon there will be no real shops left–only huge warehouses beside the freeway.
Older
@Brachiator: “There was a time, in both the US and the UK, when you could mail a letter in the morning, and get a reply in the late afternoon in the big cities.”
And in the rest of the country, mail was delivered as often as twice a week! Woot!
“That kind of service” disappeared when the postal service decided that they needed to provide the same level of service to as many people as possible, and they settled on once a day for all but the most remote locations.
KXB
George Will’s father was a professor at the University of Illinois. Will also has a son with Down Syndrome – and I don’t know if it is still the case, but Will wrote how his son works at a post office in Maryland. So a man who criticizes the role of government benefited from having a dad employed by a government-backed institute of higher learning, and has a son gainfully employed in the postal service. If the USPS were privatized, would a private company hire a man with Down Syndrome, and all the health costs that entails?