What if they just allowed those who want to to opt out of postal service to opt out? Most city and suburban residents might. Then, they can focus on who wants their service. Daily we receive junk, trash, whatever descriptor you like. Unrequested, unwanted, waste arrives daily. We pay our bills on line. Nothing delivered by USPS to my address could not be delivered by a private company. I would opt out on day one.
What if they just allowed those who want to to opt out of postal service to opt out? Most city and suburban residents might. Then, they can focus on who wants their service. Daily we receive junk, trash, whatever descriptor you like. Unrequested, unwanted, waste arrives daily. We pay our bills on line. Nothing delivered by USPS to my address could not be delivered by a private company. I would opt out on day one.
From Jeff Hummel’s American history monograph War Is The Health of the State: The Impact of Military Defense on the History of the United States
“Another permanent legacy of the Revolution was socialized mail delivery. In 1707, during
the War of the Spanish Succession (known in America as Queen Anne’s War), the British State
had established a Crown monopoly on postal service in colonial America, with the explicit goal
of facilitating censorship and suppression of sedition and treason. In early February, 1774, as the
Revolution approached, William Goddard, the radical publisher of the Maryland Journal and
Pennsylvania Chronicle, proposed an underground quasi-private postal system. By the spring of
1775, such a system was already operating from New Hampshire to Virginia, while the royal
post in New York and Boston was discharging riders for lack of work. But Congress preempted
the growth of this alternative private postal system when, in July of 1775, it established a Postal
Department and took over the existing system.
Congress monopolized the postal service to gain control over communications with the army.
It appointed Benjamin Franklin, former Deputy Postmaster of the royal post, as Postmaster-
General. The government’s postal monopoly, written into the Articles of Confederation and then
enshrined in the Constitution, has become one of the most persistently socialized enterprises in
the United States. It served early political parties as the primary source of patronage and also
went on, most noticeably during World War I, to be employed for the same purposes originally
envisaged by the British: censorship and suppression.”