Okay, I admit it, I used Hillary Clinton in my subject heading primarily to (a) pique your interest; and (b) get more search engine hits [Apparently, guest-blogging doesn’t give me access to Eugene’s metatags!]. I promise, though, that she’ll make an appearance … and soon.
But first, let me start with a thank-you to Eugene for inviting me to share my ideas in this space. It’s a real pleasure and honor to be here, not only among the regular “conspirators,” but also given the array of recent guest-bloggers including the likes of Cass Sunstein and James Q. Wilson. I’m afraid I won’t be able to reframe fundamental questions about the relationship between individuals and the state or empirically investigate the relationship between prison and crime, but I hope to say something in my own small academic corner. And, since I hope to build in the future on this work, I very much look forward to all of your comments and questions.
So now let’s return to Hillary Clinton. Back in October 2000 when she was first running for the Senate, the moderator at a televised debate asked for Clinton’s views on Bill 602P. Now, for those of you who’ve never heard of Bill 602P, you’re in good company: Clinton hadn’t either. What exactly was it? Yup, a tax increase: a proposal to impose a 5-cent tax on each e-mail message. Fortunately, as readers of this blog know well, Clinton is a tax-cutting crusader, and so she opposed the bill.
But who, you all might be asking, actually supported Bill 602P? Who could have been behind this plot to kill the goose of the Internet as it lays the golden eggs of diffusion of information? Clever readers with an economics bent will quickly intuit the answer. Who else but the evil monopolist whose business model was most threatened by the e-mail revolution: the U.S. Post Office.
Now, I hope it comes as no surprise that Bill 602P is an urban legend. But I use it because it tells us something about the perception of the Post Office in our so-called information age. The image of the Post Office in this story is one of a threatened monopolist and government bureaucracy with entrenched interests that seeks to retard the course of technological progress. In this vision one might even see the Post Office as Larry Lessig describes late twentieth century big media and telecommunications companies, as a dinosaur threatened by the Schumpeterian destabilizing impact of new communication technologies, only worse—a public dinosaur.
What I hope to do over the course of the week is to displace that image of the Post Office. I hope to convince you that the Post Office has -- like the Internet -- always been a medium of communications and that it served historically as a vehicle for a transformation in American society, just the sort that one imagines to be the result of a vast increase in the free flow of information.
More than that, however, I also hope to show you -- as Eugene pointed out in his welcome message -- that this relic of an earlier era shaped modern constitutional law. The basic idea is that choices about postal policy, made in the eighteenth century, eventually led to the shaping of three important constitutional doctrines: First Amendment "unconstitutional conditions," the First Amendment "right to receive" ideas, and the Fourth Amendment principle of communications privacy. On this, more details to follow. For now, though, I’m off to find a bunch of 42 ¢ stamps so I can send you all this “post.”
Related Posts (on one page):
- Legislatures, Institutions, and Constitutional Theory:
- The Post Office and the Origins of the Constitutional Principle of Communications Privacy:
- The Postal Monopoly and the First Amendment “Right to Receive” Ideas:
- Postal Subsidies for News and the “Unconstitutional Conditions” Doctrine:
- Hillary Clinton, the Post Office, and the Constitution:
- Anuj Desai Guest-Blogging:
I'm a bit skeptical, but I am delighted to have the opportunity to read your arguments. I'd like to thank you for sharing your thoughts in a public forum where we can respond to you.
Along the way, I'm wondering if you can tackle a question I've always wondered about: Why aren't there ads on stamps? It seems that Coca Cola or McDonald's would pay quite a premium to have their corporate logo in such an easy to see place; if they'll pay to be on the side of a bus, it seems they'll pay to be seen on an envelope. It would essentially be an ad people buy, take home with them, then send to their friends. And yet we don't observe this. If a deal could be struck, it could presumably subsidize the cost of postage rather significantly. What gives?
I was about to go postal.
You can now order stamps with your company logo or your baby's photo or NFL or college logo or whatever. (Well whatever the PO approves of- no Hitler, No Obama or McCain.) But then you must pay more than double the rate. 95¢ for a letter rather than 42¢. A little cheaper of you buy hundreds.
There are people who try to sneak in something that breaks the rules, like a photo of a young Hitler photoshopped into a new photo. But if they find out they hunt you down.
Prepaid postage stamps took off like wildfire. Everybody would have thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but that wasn't invented yet. The exciting new prepaid postage stamp concept was the primary reason the postal service ended up in the Constitution, rather than as federal and/or state laws.
That's unfortunate, because that makes it tough to get rid of the postal service, which rakes in over $1 billion from every penny increase in the cost of a postage stamp. [Cue the Amtrack arguments about servicing the boonies. But FedEx, UPS, DHL and others deliver just about anywhere now.]
I'm sure we will be told that the P.O. still does somethings better or cheaper. But it will continue to be about the only thing in government that will get smaller, as efficient free market competitors keep eating its lunch.
Obviously this would be a Bad Idea(tm) for the Post Office to undertake, but at the time it struck me as an interesting way to deal with the problems encountered in an anonymous system. It's actually fairly analogous to what Paypal has going on now, but Paypal's accountability is piggy-backed on the existing private banking system whereas the e-mail scheme was to be created wholesale by the government.
Looking forward to your posts on the PO.
Good luck with that mission.
My post office is filled with some of the laziest, least customer friendly people in the world.
I live in a 29 unit condo building in a residential area with a number of other, similar sized buildings.
You know how we receive our non-1st class mail? Rubber banded together in a large lump. Additionally, we get an average of one piece of mail a day that should have been delivered to the building next door (820 vs 828) or a building with the same number but different street address. We have complained repeatedly, and the response we have gotten from the local postmaster was basically, tough.
Now I get that the density of my neighborhood, like most urban areas, makes for a lot of mail in a small area. This is exacerbated by the explosion of 3rd class mail and the inability/unwillingness of catalog perveyors to (a) scrub their mailing lists and (b) permit me to scrub it for them by taking myself (or my spouse) off so we only get one catalog instead of two.
I also understand that often the catalogs and magazines I and my neighbors receive won't fit in the mail box. But what is the excuse for dumping a pile of UNSORTED mail in my vestibule? Postal employees are well paid and get very good benefits. When did it become my job to sort the mail? Because if it is, then the USPS better roll back the most recent postage hike.
So sorry, the post office will get no love from me.
Uniform postal service is a public good unto itself. Plus, even if the privates delivered everywhere as you claim (not true, try getting UPS to send a package to Tonasket, WA or Crawford, ME), they don't have offices anywhere near there so the residents would not be able to send mail without driving two towns over.
The idea that the USPS is a rip off is also somewhat strange to me -- reliably sending a letter across the country for $.50 in 5 days is a fantastic deal.
I just checked the UPS site, and they'll deliver a 2-pound package Next Day Air from DC to Tonasket for $63.74. To Crawford, it'll be $50.50.
If you're referring to a generic 1-ounce letter, by law, the Postal Service has a monopoly on letter mail, so there's no answer to your question.
displaces the image of the USPS as a dinosaur. Before the asteroid hit the dinosaurs too reigned supreme, but couldn't adapt to the new climate. Unfortunately for them they had no big daddy to keep them around in a world unsuited for their continued existence. Let's face it, the Congress keeps the USPS alive to preserve those high paying postal jobs. We no longer need it. The only reason advanced for keeping it is to preserve cheap delivery to sparsely occupied areas. A lame excuse if I ever heard one.
For example, the postal service charges $10 for first class mail and $20 using priority mail to deliver a 1 lb package to Kigoma, Tanzania.
FedEx does not deliver to Kigoma. It does deliver to Mwanza, about 200 miles away, for $110. UPS does deliver to Kigoma, but charges $140. All the services except first-class mail take about a week.
Universal Service does not mean just within the United States. I find it hard to imagine that FedEx and UPS cost so much more to ship abroad because of the postal monopoly in the US.
Email, for that matter, seems to be less used by younger people as they have the messaging functions of social networking sites, instant messaging, cellphone text messages, etc.
I heard a person speaking on the radio about people using letter-rate postal mail only to send certain ritual objects: cards, invitations, and RSVPs. Just about anything else can be handled by a phone call or some sort of electronic message.
My biggest complaint, as I stated above, is that the mail is not delivered sorted by recipient. If the 3rd class is too large or numerous to fit in the box it should at least be segregated. Just dumping 20+ people's mail in a pile is not acceptable.