Friday, September 21, 2007

Back to cranky

Just a short little post at Cato-at-Liberty raised my blood pressure or caused me mild depression, I can tell which. Thrust of the post:
But while we’ve still got a moribund and bloated government postal service, Germany’s privatized Deutsche Post seems to be at the leading edge in global shipping and business services. We’ve got congested, government-owned, and union-dominated seaports, while Dubai will be host to a huge and efficient intermodal system.
Who'd have thought that we would be looking at Germany as an example of less bureaucracy?

I truly, TRULY believe that the best thing our government can do for our economy is to get out of the way. We can argue all day long (and we would, since we never seemed to get anywhere) about whether government should subsidize our health care, and I will concede that the nature of that good makes it a complicated debate. However, why do we have a transportation bill where the question is not how much will we subsidize an industry (or really, a single company) instead of why should we be subsidizing it?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have no comparison of the cost of postal services in other countries or how USPS parcel post rates compare with UPS or others. I am not dissatisfied with our letter services. I DO object to our system where I can not refuse delivery of the deluge of unsolicited junk mail.

Right now I'm listening to The Moody Blues: Sur la Mer

Tim in the South said...

Cranky's good. It brings out your passion and I like that.

I'm listening to Roma Cafe, Italian jazz from the 50's.

Pete said...

It took years and a lot of EU bullying to privatize DP, even though I think they still have a monopoly on letters and other light mail. In fact, it's amazing US Postal is still not privatized.

Anonymous said...

Well, at least our system is relatively inexpensive and pretty reliable. I mean, 41 cents to ship a letter from here to Seattle? No complaints.

Competition has been good for the USPS. After all, why send parcels through them when there is FedEx, UPS, and DHL in the world?

IIRC, the USPS is the only gov't agency to fund itself. So you won't hear me picking on it, too much.