The Post Office deserves a special celebration this year, with Demon Elon and Demon Trump conspiring to destroy it. Elon’s Destruction Of Government Excellence is explicitly defunding all the GOOD and USEFUL parts of government while expanding the BAD and EVIL parts.
Admittedly there are a couple of mixed cases. Department of Education originally served a small purpose but it has Parkinsoned so far from the origin that it’s not worth supporting.
As I noted before, the PO only receives a TINY amount of money** from the treasury, so even if it was bad and wasteful it wouldn’t be a problem. But in fact it performs a vital service for ORDINARY PEOPLE. It’s required to serve everyone, not just the favored few, and it does a DAMN good job.
The postal system celebrates its 250th anniversary with a podcast.
Lots of interesting details in the podcast. The British government was running a postal system in the colonies for quite a while. The revolutionaries took it over in 1775 for the same reason that modern rebels often start by taking the main TV station. They needed to coordinate their military campaigns.
Distinct free-standing post offices are a more recent development. Early postal stations were services provided by various businesses, a tradition continued in Branch Substations now. Taverns and inns naturally hosted stations because inns were places where travelers stopped to rest or change horses. Printshops that published a local paper also hosted a station so they could monitor incoming news. The ancestor of newswires!
Ben Franklin was already the postmaster for the Brits, and continued after the revolution. He was qualified because he ran a printshop.
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Irrelevant sidenote: The birthday is July 26. I have a pleasant association of 7/26 with postal matters from listening to Radio Havana. Cuba’s revolutionary anniversary was the same day, so Radio Havana’s mailing address was Apartado Postal 70-26, La Habana, Cuba. I wrote to that address several times and they politely answered my letters.
** Relevant sidenote: The PO gets 50 million a year in government subsidy. This is equivalent to the annual income of THREE individual Safeway stores. Each individual store grosses about 17 million a year.
Polistra's Mill 