Fantastic Lew Rockwell essay on campaignforliberty.com:
“Writing in The State and Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin summed up the economic aim of socialism as follows: ‘To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service….’
Incredible, isn’t it? After centuries of treatises and miles of paper and tubs of ink, this is the great historical turning point: government employees carrying sacks of paper mail from house to house, and operating at an economic loss.
It’s fascinating how it all comes down to the post office, again and again in the history of public policy. And so it is in our time, with Obama’s admission/gaffe/slip concerning the post office and its analogy to what he wants to do with health care.
Here is a transcript of his spontaneous talk at a high school. A student raised a question about the government’s provision of health services and its impact on private services.
‘How can a private company compete against the government? My answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining, meaning that taxpayers aren’t subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services, and a good network of doctors, just like private insurers do, then I think private insurers should be able to compete.
‘They do it all the time. If you think about it, UPS and Fed-Ex are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems…. there is nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private marketplace. As long as it is not set up where the government is being subsidized by the taxpayers so that even if they are providing a good deal, we keep having to pony up more and more money.’
Now, these comments are nothing short of incredible. The Post Office has been on the loser list for many decades. Most recently, it has been included on the GAO’s high-risk list, increasing its debt to $10.2 billion and incurring a cash shortfall of $1 billion.
Note that the post office is not being shut down for this mess. On the contrary, it is being subsidized not only with tax dollars but, most importantly, with laws. Title 18 (I.83.1696) says that ‘Whoever establishes any private express for the conveyance of letters or packets’ can be fined and jailed. Moreover, the law (39.I.6.606) says that any letter delivered by unlawful means can be seized and stolen by the government. It is immune from antitrust action and criminal liability. [emphasis added]
. . . .
Therefore Obama is right in a strange way: private enterprise has triumphed and government service is terrible. Everyone knows this. It is utterly preposterous that a government mail service exists at all. There is no theory of economics that supports it. There is not now nor has there ever been any economic reason for government postal service. It should be immediately abolished and private enterprise should take over. Even on the basis of Obama’s thin and strange statements, you might argue this conclusion.
But perhaps Obama meant to suggest that the reason the Post Office is so bad is because it has to compete with private enterprise. If he meant that, he lives in a socialist fantasy land, and we have a very dangerous man on our hands. In the real world, no living person could possibly believe that mail service would be improved by getting rid of the efficient producers and granting a totalitarian monopoly to a single government-backed provider.
. . . .
The right path to health-care reform is the market path (no subsidies, no monopolies such as drug patents, no licensure, no anything) that tends toward universal distribution at very low prices and relentless improvement in service. The wrong path is to make health care run the same way as the post office. Obama seems to favor the latter path, even though he admits that it is the least well-performing one. This is surely the definition of fanaticism. If the mobs aren’t angry, they should be.” (Read more on campaignforliberty.com)
