http://hnn.us/articles/116092.html
Water and Mail.
Mr. Heuisler:
Please look at a rainfall and water runoff map of the United
States. You will find that the major sources of your water in
Arizona are up in Colorado near Teluride and up in Wyoming
near Yellowstone Park. Under true local control, Colorado,
Wyoming, and Utah would divert the water for their own use, the
same way that Turkey is doing in Anatolia; the Colorado River
would cease to flow; and Arizona would dry up and blow away.
In 1930, before the water projects got going in a serious way,
Arizona's population was about four hundred thousand, despite the
fact that Arizona had been settled for nearly two
hundred years. That reflected a good deal of mining employment
which has since been automated out of existence. In 1870, the
population figure had been about nine thousand, a tenth of the
contemporary population of New Mexico (*). That latter figure,
nine thousand people, would probably be something like
Arizona's "ecological carrying capacity." In terms of water, you
are a beggar in the street.
(*) The Rio Grande is not an appreciably bigger river than the
Colorado, but it is not effectively buried at the bottom of a
mile-deep canyon-- it is where people could use it before high
dams came along. Look at Colin Fletcher's _The Man Who Walked
Through Time_. During his trip up the Grand Canyon, he was always
worrying about where he could climb up or down to fill his
canteens.
Grain is closely related to water, because it requires so much
water to grow. In Arizona, you import government-subsidized grain
from Iowa and North Dakota. Absent the government subsidies, Iowa
and North Dakota farmers would go to "low-input farming," and
produce beef (or maybe bison), rather than shipping trainloads of
grain down to feedlots in Arizona. Look at the April 2009 issue of
Trains Magazine, a special issue dealing with grain. Among other
things, it has a nice map of grain movements. Roughly
speaking, the dividing line between grain producers and consumers
runs as follows. Fort Worth, Texas; Amarillo, Texas; Denver,
Colorado; Boise, Idaho; Spokane, Washington. Farmers
east of this line sell grain-- farmers west of the
line buy grain and feed it to livestock. East of the
Mississippi, the dividing line is roughly the Appalachian
Mountains. Farmers in Ohio sell grain-- farmers in Georgia
buy it and feed it to livestock, typically chickens and hogs.
As for the Post Office, the Post Office would not be much use if
it could only deliver things to the next block. It has to be a
national organization, in some form or other. Your choice is
between a federal government department and a mega-corporation. Of
course, you could compare the Post Office with UPS and Fed Ex, but
I think a fairer comparison would be with a related business,
telecommunications, which is dominated by corporations, and where
corporations are not under pressure to compete with a "public
option." Cable television companies represent the "business ethic"
in its purest form. Therefore, you need to explain why you think
Comcast is better than the Post Office. You have to deal with the
fact that Comcast sometimes does block traffic which it
thinks might compete with its own businesses. Likewise, you have
to deal with the fact that Comcast employees sometimes carry out
armed robberies, taking advantage of their uniforms to secure the
trust of the public. There was a weird case involving Verizon
recently. A Verizon employee in New York came to a man's door, and
when the man asked for identification, the Verizon employee
forced his way in and beat the householder up, before being
subdued by an off-duty policeman. Afterwards, Verizon took
the line that since the Verizon employee had managed to beat the
rap, via a stay-out-of-trouble bargain with the DA's office, he
must be altogether innocent. As firms compete, and try to maximize
profits, they are under pressure to find cheaper and cheaper
labor-- and you get what you pay for. The uniforms may _look_
spiffy enough, but there often isn't very much in the way of
background checks behind them. I could go on, but if you are
interested, read Techdirt.com.
Also, take a look at James H. Bruns, _Motorized Mail_
(1997). It offers an interesting perspective of how the public
mails reached their present level, with improvements like Rural
Free Delivery and Parcel Post. The Post Office started doing
Parcel Post to fill a public need, because the commercial
railway-express companies had formed a combination, and were going
in for price-gouging. I have a couple of facsimile Sears catalogs
(1900 and 1908). Sears was recommending customers to organize
"buying clubs" to put together group orders weighing a hundred
pounds or more, to circumvent the express companies pricing
schemes. The official railroad express shipping rate from Chicago
to Arizona was about twelve gold-backed dollars per hundred
pounds, say six dollars per pound in modern money, or twelve
dollars per pound for a small shipment. Something like a pair of
boots, shipped alone, was an "uneconomic shipment," on
account of the high shipping rates. Needless to say, when
Parcel Post went through during the Wilson Administration,
in 1913, some of the major backers were department store
magnates who were in the mail-order business.
To get some idea of the kinds of local monopolies which Sears
broke down, take note of the fact that they were profitably
selling canned vegetables, eg. corn, lima beans, etc. A
2-1/2 lb. can might cost ten gold-backed cents (fifteen
gold-backed cents, inclusive of shipping to Arizona, or about
three modern dollars for a standard modern can of 15 oz.). That
must have been about five or six times the rate in the modern
supermarket. Just think of the sheer scale of local commercial
monopolies in terms of which it made economic
sense to get canned beans by mail-order from across the country. I
really don't think Parcel Post was such a monstrous
incursion upon liberty.
William J. Stepp, a principled Libertarian, responded. Like most
Libertarians, he was not very well informed about practical
details. So I educated him:]
(09/03/2009 09:42 AM)
Public Versus
Private-- The Way It Really Was.
Well, over most of the country, MaxMail only delivers to
postal sorting centers. There are only about two hundred of
those. Delivering on that basis is not an autonomous operation--
it's more comparable to magazine fulfillment, or similar printer
services. I suppose MaxMail has some kind of courier service in
New York, but that is a special case. At least one of the
companies you cite seems to be one of the old Lower Manhattan
bicycle courier shops. To deliver mail or parcels on a
national basis, you have to have hundreds of thousands of
carriers. Launching a new national carrier is an uphill
proposition because you have to overcome the economies of
scale of existing players. DHL, which was a subsidiary of
the German post office (D stands for Deutsche), tried for a
while, but lost money, and eventually folded. If a carrier has
to drive an hour between every delivery point, the rates are
going to be impossibly high. To have reasonable costs, the
driver has to make a delivery every couple of minutes,
which, in an urban area would mean every block or so. That
means there have to be a lot of drivers, and you practically
have to have at least a ten percent market share to be in
the business at all. Apparently, DHL did not manage to get a big
enough market share, or perhaps there simply wasn't room for
four national carriers in the market.
http://www.cmsnetwork.com/
http://maxxmailusa.com/
If you make deliveries to a given address with any regularity,
you can often arrange with the occupant to put up a box which is
not, technically, a mailbox. It has your company name written on
the side instead of "U.S. Mail." A lot of newspapers used
to have their own plastic boxes, as a practical
alternative to throwing the paper in the bushes. A plastic
box made in China is really cheap. You would probably spend more
to have your representative talk to the householder, and get his
permission to install the box, than the box itself would cost.
Of course, to get still more to the heart of the matter, in many
cases, a mailbox is apt to have keys, or it may be located in a
lobby or stairwell with keyed access. Thus, in demanding
"equality" for private carriers, you are effectively demanding
that they be given, of right, latchkeys to private premises.
What makes Business-to-Business delivery work is the assumption
that the recipient employs a receptionist, doorkeeper,
concierge, etc., whose job is to greet the public, and who can
pay instant attention to the parcel deliveryman when he
comes in the door. I have noticed that Federal
Express deliverymen become noticeably irritable when one does
not answer the door as fast as someone who is paid to
respond instantly. I think I only ever got one
parcel through DHL before they folded. The doorbell rang, and by
the time I got to the door, the deliveryman was gone, and
there was a parcel on the doorstep, valued at about two
hundred dollars. Whether that was acceptable to the
shipper is more than I can say. UPS operates to rather higher
standards, of course.
The truth is that, for anyone except junk mailers, forty-some
cents for a first class stamp is perfectly acceptable. I find
that I usually send a letter, instead of an e-mail, when I am
sending a check, and postage is much cheaper than bank
fees. For various kinds of junk mail, the Post Office offers
rates as low as seven cents, if you bar-code in all the
right places, and presort to the last detail, and put
bulky material on the internet-- in general, never make a human
do what a computer can do. If you aren't willing to spend seven
cents for my attention, I don't think I want to listen to
your sales pitch. That is the whole lesson of SPAM e-mails.
I think you don't quite grasp the seriousness of the Comcast
crime cases. The case in Oregon the month before last involved a
Comcast employee carrying out a robbery in the course of which
he hit a clerk over the head with an iron bar. It was a
particularly brutal sort of robbery. It is only the Comcast
employee's dumb luck that he is not facing a Capital Murder
charge.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/comcast_robbery_suspect_tied_t.html
http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_070809_news_se_portland_rovbbery_assault.1ed99801.html
A case a couple of years ago involves a serial sex-killer:
http://media.www.chicagoflame.com/media/storage/paper519/news/2007/03/12/NewsBriefs/Lawsuit.Says.Comcast.Let.Suspicious.Repairman.To.Make.House.Calls-2772545.shtml
Local monopolies:
The key word is "horse." A horse can go only a limited
distance. Like a man, and unlike an automobile, a horse
gets tired, and must sleep before he can do more
work. In the nineteenth century, the American railroads
were located, taking account of the limited strength of the
horse, so that a farmer's horse-drawn wagon could reach
one, and only one, railroad station, operated by a single
railroad company. And, yes, the commercial monopoly implied
thereby entered into the railroad locater's economic
calculations. The railroad would not build if it was not assured
of a commercial monopoly. The result was a town of five
hundred people, more or less like Sherwood Anderson's fictional
_Winesburg, Ohio_, with one of each kind of store. See
also, Frank Norris, _The Octopus_.
The railroads and their associated express companies did
not deliver in rural areas. The farmer had to go to town,
say an hour of travel each way, and collect his goods at
the railroad depot. Until 1896, he had to collect his mail on
this basis, and it wasn't practical to do so more than
once a week. The express company charged an hour's wages or
more, just to pick up a small parcel from a shelf and set it on
a counter, just because it could. In a small town, the express
agent was probably also the railroad stationmaster. A local
train might stop once or twice a day in each direction. The
station agent or express agent wheeled a cart up to the baggage
car and spent a few minutes rapidly unloading stuff before
wheeling the cart back into the station building, and
putting everything on the appropriate shelves. And then he could
sit around with his cronies, telling tall stories, like a
character in a Ring Lardner story. On Saturday morning, of
course, when the farmers came into town to do their business,
there would be more of a rush. Naturally, the local power
structure had a good deal to say about who got the near-sinecure
station agent and express agent jobs-- they were just the thing
for the mayor's neer-do-well son.
The profits of monopolistic rural service went into subsidizing
high-speed expresses along competitive routes, such as New
York-Chicago, where the New York Central faced off against the
Pennsylvania Railroad.
When a farmer got a Model T Ford, circa 1915-1920, he was
suddenly free to drive thirty or forty miles to a small city,
with a population in the tens of thousands, where there were
many competing stores, and better prices.
Parenthetically, experience shows that if you collect your
mail from a store, the shopkeeper is likely to make
difficulties unless you buy stuff from the store. He doesn't
want you buying stuff mail-order when you could buy it from him.