Category Archives: markets

“How to Save the Post Office, Maybe”

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That’s the headline of a Monday Wall Street Journal editorial.

In response to which I ask, why do we need to?

After all, using the Editors’ own numbers,

the USPS says in 2006 there were 5.6 daily pieces of mail per delivery point. Last year: three. By 2030 the estimate is 1.7.

Why? It’s a shrinking need; the Internet is supplanting mail delivery. In-person communication is done by telephone, Skype, Zoom, and a plethora of other applications. Written correspondence is handled, in among other ways, by a plethora of email facilities.

The Postmaster General, and the Editors, think it would be a good idea to extend the delivery time for long distance first class mail from three days to as many as five. The horror.

They also want to boost the price of using the mail system—the stamps we use.

Here’s a thought about an alternative, though, and one that has a chance of saving both our taxpayer dollars and reducing our consumer costs.

Our Constitution mandates only that the Federal government establish Post Offices and Post Roads. There’s no requirement that the Federal government—or any other level of governance—run the post office and post roads. The latter especially are everywhere, from the Interstate highway system and Federal highways to State highways, County roads, Farm to Market roads, etc, etc, etc.

Let private enterprise run the post offices, too, and handle all mail delivery.

Everything other than first class mail and junk mail and advertising fliers (but I repeat myself) already is handled competitively and efficiently (because competition) by private enterprises.

There’s no reason those private enterprises, or others that would appear in the competitive market, can’t handle first class delivery and junk mail and advertisements, also. And in the latter case, digital junk and ads already are ubiquitous. The paper needn’t be. Think of the trees.

Internal Tariffs

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Mercantilist tariffs (as opposed to tariffs as foreign policy tools) are purely protectionist, designed to punish competitors for competing. They’re not only aimed at foreign competition, either, as Europe’s auto industry is demonstrating [emphasis added].

Auto makers in Europe eager to boost sales of their electric vehicles have a new strategy: demanding higher taxes on conventional vehicles that burn gas and diesel fuel.
The top executives at several car and truck makers are calling on European governments to introduce the new taxes on carbon-dioxide emissions from gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and trucks as a way to help their EVs better compete.

And there’s this bit of disingenuosity [emphasis added]:

Taxing emissions from polluting vehicles, he [Volkswagen AG Chairman of the Board of Management and VW Group CEO Herbert Diess] and other executives say, would help ensure electric vehicles remain attractive for buyers after the expiration of subsidies that are now sustaining sales.

But don’t you dare think about taxing the EVs’ pollution from mining the materials needed for the batteries, the pollution from manufacturing those batteries, or the pollution from disposing of those batteries when they’re spent.

Once again, if a company’s product is unable to compete in a free market without subsidies for their own products or artificial burdens—those internal protectionist tariffs—laid on competing products, the company’s product is not viable and not ready for market.

Full stop.

Sanctioning Russia

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Maybe. President Joe Biden (D) is acting like he’s taking action that would seem to respond to Russia’s SolarWinds hack and interference with the 2020 Presidential election. His potential action includes

  • expulsion of 10 Russian diplomats, includ[ing] representatives of Russian intelligence services
  • sanctions against “dozens” of people and companies
  • target[ing] Moscow’s ability to borrow money by prohibiting US financial institutions from buying Russian bonds directly from Russian institutions.

The sanctions will take effect on 14 June.

It turns out, on inspection that this move isn’t all that. Expelling some low-level diplomatic functionaries isn’t a very strong move. Neither is the action against Russian bonds very strong: that “sanction” explicitly allows US institutions to buy Russian bonds from resellers and elsewhere in the secondary markets. Rather than being a strong move, it just adds a trivial layer of bureaucracy.

And there’s the delay of a month-and-a-half before taking effect. It won’t take those diplomats six weeks to pack up and leave. It won’t take six weeks for business entities to adjust their relationships with the “dozens.” It won’t take six weeks for US institutions to adjust their buying procedures to focus on the secondary markets.

None of that even has to begin earlier than those six weeks.

However.

The Biden administration will have six weeks of distractions from the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China and from the Biden administration’s begging of Iran to let the US back into the nuclear weapons development deal.

The Biden administration will have six weeks in which to let its finger-wagging at the Russians die down, followed by quietly dropping the sanction threat.

Income Inequality

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The Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party like to bleat about this and to complain further about how it has only gotten worse.

They know better.

Here’s a little tidbit, from Phil Gramm’s and John Early’s op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal:

While the disparity in earned income has become more pronounced in the past 50 years, the actual inflation-adjusted income received by the bottom quintile, counting the value of all transfer payments received net of taxes paid, has risen by 300%. The top quintile has seen its after-tax income rise by only 213%. As government transfer payments to low-income households exploded, their labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

That bit is disguised, as Gramm and Early point out, by the Census Bureau’s decision to not count taxes paid and Government transfers—welfare payments—paid when it measures income.

Of course the Left and their Party want to ignore actual facts—that’s demonstrated by that last part: [low-income household] labor-force participation collapsed, and the percentage of income in the bottom quintile coming from government payments rose above 90%.

Those are carefully created Government dependents—and votes collected in payment for those handouts.

“Sanctions”

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That’s what US, Canada, Britain, and European Union politicians are claiming they’ll impose on the People’s Republic of China in response to PRC genocide efforts against the Uyghurs in the PRC’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The sanctions are expected to vary in type, and will include Global Magnitsky economic sanctions on individuals alleged to be involved with the mistreatment of the Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.

Among those sanctions are these which the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU already imposed last Monday to four (count ’em) PRC officials:

  • Zhu Hailun, former deputy Communist Party head in Xinjiang
  • Wang Junzheng, party secretary of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
  • Wang Mingshan, member of the Xinjiang’s Communist Party standing committee
  • Chen Mingguo, director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau (PSB)
  • Xinjiang Public Security Bureau itself

Politico noted, interestingly, that the EU explicitly omitted to sanction the top Communist Party boss in Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo.

That’ll show them. We’re wagging our fingers very firmly at the PRC, and shortly we’ll be wagging our fingers even more vigorously.

Right.

What’s truly needful here is—at the minimum—a ban on import or even purchase of goods manufactured, including constituent parts, or assembled in Xinjiang or any business anywhere in the PRC with any sort of tie back to Xinjiang, and a parallel ban on doing any sort of business with a Xinjiang-associated enterprise.

Better would be to expand that list to include an ever broadening set of imports from or exports to the PRC until that nation provides publicly available and publicly verifiable proof that the PRC has put an end to its assault on the Uyghurs.

Fat chance, though, as the politicians of the four nations have shown themselves too timid to do more