At 07:26 PM 8/1/00 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, sunder wrote:
>> Jim Choate wrote:
>> > On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Eric Murray wrote:
>> > > Well, they could make all other email services illegal.
>> > > Yea, not bloody likely. But governments have done
>> > > stupider things.
>> > See the 1st.
>> That would be nice, except for two things. .gov has deemed that the post
>> office should be a monopoly*, and thus it and only it is allowed to carry
>> mails.
>
>No, the Constitution REQUIRES the post office to be a monopoly.
Maybe the Republic of Texas consitution requires that,
but the US Constitution on says, in Section 8, that the Congress
shall have the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads".
No mention of monopoly there.
> General post, as a general principle of democratic society, since it
represents a
>'press' and is critical in the 'speech' of the people and they are
>required by oath to protect both is justification to have it managed by
>the central or federal government versus a bunch of individual businesses.
One can argue, though IMHO not successfully, that it's useful for the
Government to fund a post office that sends mail to everybody,
but that's still no justification for monopoly. Far from it!
A government postal monopoly, by deciding what content of speech
it would carry and forbidding competition, could censor that speech
in ways that the First Amendment clearly opposes and supersedes.
(What? The Post Office ban mailing obscene content? Never happen...)
>> Second while the 1st does protect speech, it doesn't prevent .gov from
>> fucking with the method of transporation. See the FCC for another example.
>
>Um, as a matter of fact the Constitution REQUIRES the federal government
>to regulate inter-state commerce.
Again, no, it only gives Congress power to do so, and does it particularly
to take that power away from the states. Somehow they've bullied the courts
into letting them extend that power to things like growing your own grain
on your own farm to feed your own animals, and growing your own dope
on your own farm to feed your own head, but then the Supremes in the
early 1900s were no particular friends of the First Amendment,
viz Schenck.
>> [* An interesting exception is that things like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. do
>> exist and do compete with the USPS's parcel post, but that's for packages.]
>
>In COMMERCIAL environments. If we were to reduce it to the majority of
>traffic that is carried by the USPS then they'd go broke in about a week.
The reason there's a postal monopoly is in large part because of an
anarchist lawyer, Lysander Spooner, who believed that private business
could do a much better job of anything that a government business,
and demonstrated it by running a better postal service in Rochester New York
than the US Snail could, in about the 1840s. They couldn't beat him
at their own game, so they banned him from competing.
P.S. Jim Choate's broken mail software put another of those CDR things in,
but I fixed that.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
