E- MAIL IS INSTANTANEOUS and always gets through.
"Snail-mail," as Internet surfers call the Postal Service, is late 20 percent of the time (58 percent in Washington, D.C.), and mail is sometimes undelivered, found months later piled up in back yards, abandoned trucks and unmarked graves.Both e-mail and the Postal Service are in the business of transmitting information. But while one is a highly competitive private service with rapidly declining costs, the other is a government monopoly - slow to change, slow to deliver - with spotty service. The cost of using it has risen from 8 cents to 32 cents over two decades - three cents in 1995 alone.
Maybe, in the forenoon of the information age, it's time to bring the sunlight of competition into the delivery of the mail. End the legal monopoly for the Postal Service and its government subsidies and open mail delivery up to competition. Free the mail and costs would decline, service would improve and those devoted postal workers who deliver the mail could even own the company.
Congress might turn the ownership of the Postal Service over to its workers. Each could be given shares of stock in the newly privatized corporation, with a shareholder's vote.
Such privatization has been proposed in legislation supported by a group of Republican congressmen led by Reps. Phil Crane of Illinois and Dana Rohrbacher of California.
We know such reform will work because of the great success in areas where the legal monopoly already has been repealed. Overnight mail is one example.
Twenty years ago, Congress allowed private sector competition into the overnight mail service. Today private companies like Federal Express have captured 90 percent of the business and there is no question service and quality have improved.
Another example is package delivery, where the United Parcel Service and other private firms are again allowed to compete directly with the Postal Service. Again, the public seems to greatly prefer the private competitive firms, who have won 90 percent of the business.
Critics argue that only the Postal Service can provide universal service throughout the whole country, and at universal, nationwide prices.
But Federal Express and the other overnight mail firms all deliver nationwide, and at uniform prices. The same is true of UPS and the other private delivery companies. They want their customers to know that when they walk in the door they will be able to send their letter or package anywhere in the country.
If the Postal Service is forced to compete on all services across the board, its performance will greatly improve as well. Postal Service workers are perfectly capable of doing first-rate work. They and their organization just lack the right incentives under the current system.
In 1845 Congress enacted the postal monopoly to protect the post office from competition. One hundred and fifty years later, in the age of e-mail, the 104th Congress ought to repeal it.