- Women-only ride-hailing service (“Chariot”) set to launch in Boston. But is it actually legal under prevailing discrimination law? [Story Hinckley, Christian Science Monitor]
- Troll it with flowers: “Intellectual Ventures Hits Florist With Do-It-On-A-Computer Scheduling Patent” [Daniel Nazer, TechDirt]
- Pirate smugglers of Lake Champlain! Hillary Clinton’s tales of Vermont gun-running are silly beyond belief [Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Washington Post “Fact Checker”; Three Pinocchios]
- “Does Anyone Get Arrested For Breaking Those Weird Old Laws? This Man Did” [Mental Floss on Michigan swearing law]
- Harassment in Harrisburg: “Retaliation and Intimidation Persist in AG [Kathleen] Kane’s Office” [Lizzy McLellan and Ben Seal, The Legal Intelligencer, earlier]
- “Congress should privatize the USPS, repeal its legal monopolies, and give the company the flexibility it needs to innovate and reduce costs.” [Chris Edwards, Cato]
6 Comments
“Congress should privatize the USPS, repeal its legal monopolies, and give the company the flexibility it needs to innovate and reduce costs.”
Better yet, Liquidate it and let UPS and FedEx take over mail service.
yeah, but who would photograph the envelope for the NSA? And would it end up saving the taxpayers anything?
There is a quite possibly apocryphal story (at least I have never been able to trace it to an attested historical source) that Benjamin Franklin was asked why the fledgling republic should deliver mail when it did not deliver other everyday necessities to people’s doors and replied, “Madam, the government has no interest in reading your cabbages.”
The USPS does do some regulatory stuff which cannot be outsourced to FedEx and the like, and which helps to create the infrastructure in which these other companies operate. First, there is a rule that two cities in one state cannot have the same name. Who made this rule? USPS. Then there is the zip code system, also from USPS. These systems, along with other postal regulations, help so that people have unique addresses and mail can make its way to specific locations.
Another thing needs to be kept in mind. Some communities are not cost effective to provide mail service to. And occasionally, the government needs to contact people in those communities. Without the USPS, who will do the contacting?
If we are to either fully privatize the USPS or abolish it, we would need to make sure that those aspects of the USPS not directly part of delivering mail are continued in some fashion.
Anyone who actually knows anything about Vermont would know that we Vermonters like our guns and, though mostly too polite or taciturn to mention it, don’t really care for New Yorkers. Why on earth would we sell them our guns?
So that they can become a self correcting problem?