Arguing with Libertarians
posted in Rantings |Lew Rockwell postulates some theoretical pros and cons of the breaking “the US Government’s monopoly” on postal service. In actuality, most of what he has to say was anticipated. In general, while I don’t consider it fruitful to argue this point (because I don’t see a change happening and because there are more important things to argue about), I thought one argument was interesting. One of his straw man arguments for, err, against multiple postal carriers is that we’d get more junk mail. And then he knocks it down with “there is strong market demand for less junk mail, not more” .
I agree- there is indeed strong market demand for less junk mail. And it seems reasonable to believe that multiple carriers would give us a possibility for some sort of heuristic sorting of mail into junk and not-junk categories. But, as we see in the Internet realm (Lew Rockwell also makes many parallels between the postal service and the internet), it’s difficult to decide what exactly is “junk.” Oh sure, anything with an address to “cia1is user” might be junk mail. But what about offers for credit cards? Someone (evil credit companies not withstanding) might want those. Or the letters from OPB asking us for money.
Basically it would come to some level of a value judgement on my inbound mail– and I’m not sure I’m ready to trust someone else with that yet. And multiple carriers would have multiple levels of junk mail thresholds; you might even ban certain carriers from delivering your mail if you get enough junk from them.
Humbug, I say.
