Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Wisconsin’s Medical Experiment’
In ‘Wisconsin’s Medical Experiment,’ John Stossel cites the U.S. Postal Service as one example of socialism [Oped, “Wisconsin’s Medical Experiment,” August 8, 2007].
I must disagree with this depiction of USPS. Though it is a government-run agency, USPS is the only such agency to rely entirely on the income it generates from providing services to consumers for its funding.
Additionally, USPS has proven itself to be not only responsive to the free market, but also a market leader. USPS has implemented such cutting-edge and consumer convenient innovations as self-service kiosks at post offices, online postage purchase and label printing, free at-home pick-up of packages to be shipped — as opposed to UPS and FedEx, which charge for pick-up — and online package tracking and delivery confirmation. Furthermore, unlike other federal government agencies, USPS is entirely competent at carrying out its mission, namely, the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail daily.
In no other country on the planet can one drop a bill that is due in only a few days into a mailbox with confidence that it will be timely delivered, no matter the distance to its destination.
Contrast Italy, from which postcards that I have mailed to America have taken more than two months to arrive. Were every government agency so well run and responsive to the market, the federal budget would be far smaller and the federal government would operate far more efficiently while delivering far more services to the public.
Robert Renzulli
New York, N.Y.
