The Constitution, the Post Office, and the Future

Article One, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution says that “Congress shall have power…To establish Post Offices and post Roads.” In fact, the Continental Congress had taken on that power and responsibility even before declaring independence from Britain, appointing Benjamin Franklin to be postmaster general back in July 1775. (He’d held a similar position under royal rule in the 1750s, administering the system at times from London.)

There’s no question, therefore, that the U.S. of A.’s Founders viewed the transmission of letters and packages as an essential part of the national government even though there were also private carriers. Joseph M. Adelman starts at that point in his Publick Occurrences essays about the long history the U.S. Postal Service.

Until forty years ago, the postmaster general was still part of the President’s Cabinet. In that year, Congress enacted a new law that spun off the service as a quasi-independent organization, meant to work like a profit-seeking business and insulated from politics.

Except, of course, that it’s not. If the Postal Service were truly a business, then it wouldn’t have to deliver first-class mail to almost anyplace in the country for the same small price—the requirement of universal service. Furthermore, the agency’s finances are still under Congress’s control. At the Redtape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan ran the math on the results:

Right now, the Postal Service is being forced to pre-pay health benefits for the next 75 years during a 10-year stretch. In the past four years, those prepayments have totaled $21 billion. The agency's deficit during that time is about $20 billion. Remove these crazy pre-payments — a requirement that no other government agency endures and no private industry would even consider — and the Postal Service would be in the black. . . . the Postal Service starts its year in a hole designed to hide a portion of the federal deficit.

Those costs are also linked to two more of the U.S. of A.’s biggest economic challenges: the Bush-Cheney recession and the rise in health costs.

Of course, everyone recognizes that the volume of first-class mail is dropping tremendously because of the internet. Even if the economy hadn’t taken the worst hit since the Great Depression in 2008, the deficit were smaller, and our health-care system weren’t weighed down by unnecessary costs, the Postal Service’s business model would still be outdated.

But the constitutional principle behind that agency still stands. In fact, our modern economy and way of life depend on speedy, reliable, and widespread communication more than ever. So what is the federal government’s responsibility?

Our judicial and political systems have already concluded that our freedom of the press isn’t limited by the fact we no longer use eighteenth-century printing technology. The First Amendment applies to mimeograph machines and offset printers, radio and television, the internet, and so on. Similarly, people who read the Second Amendment broadly argue that the “arms” it refers to include modern firearms. The U.S. Navy has expanded beyond copper-plated wooden ships.

By the same logic, the clause of the Constitution quoted above empowers Congress to establish the service and infrastructure for Americans to exchange messages in the modern fashion—electronically and digitally. By analogy to the Postal Service, that service should reach nearly everyone and come at a minimal cost. In fact, the U.S. government was in on the ground floor of that service, developing the early internet within the Defense Department.

In recent years those systems and services have been established and expanded mostly by private businesses, often but not always regulated by state and local governments as utilities. But there were also private delivery services in 1775 and 1787, and the Founders didn’t think those were enough.

[Image above courtesy of Northampton, New Hampshire.]