If you pay an employee a fat salary, give him a prestigious title, and then pump up his package with perks like free mailing privileges, well, you feel like he owes you some work. Maybe you need to give him an occasional assignment.
That’s why I wrote my Representative in Congress, Mr. “Bud” Cramer, to help me solve a bureaucratic conundrum. I waited nervously for the response, since it was my first assignment to him. I was anxious to evaluate his performance, as well as solve the mystery.
My assignment was a simple one for this Servant of the People. I asked him, where in the library of law books that frame our civic lives, I could locate the words that gave the United States Postal Service monopolistic powers. Their singular status was common knowledge – they had a choke hold on “first class mail” – or so it was said. It’s not simple, you know, like “Thou shalt not kill”. What about Fed Ex and UPS and courier services? Puzzling. THEY delivered letters and stayed out of jail. What sequence of legal words, from what source, and interpreted by whom cast a curse on private ownership of delivery services? Why could an enterprising businessman deliver me a large order of General Kao Pow’s ginger-kissed chicken wings, but not an 8 by 11-1/2 square of bond with typed or handwritten words stuffed in an envelope? As Don Quixote weakly whispers on his deathbed. The words. . . Tell me the words, please, the words. That was my question to Congressman Cramer. An impossible dream, though I never suspected it at the time. Yes, where were the words defining our Postal prerequisites. Where are they carved in the legislative stone that frames the unique status of our USPS? That’s the task I assigned my Congressional employee. Consequently, I’m proud to say that Representative Cramer, respecting my quest for knowledge reacted promptly. He forwarded my letter to the pseudo-monopolists who were the subject of my inquiry, the USPS.
To their credit, they replied promptly back to the senator, who using their services relayed the letter to my home – not to my neighborhood, not to my block – but directly to my mailbox. They’re good at that, I must admit.
The USPS letter has two themes of interest to the communications truth seeker: 1) It informed me that “a group of federal civil and criminal laws known as the Private Express Statutes (PES) state that only the Postal Service may carry letters”. (How could it be?) 2) These statutes enable the USPS to be the most efficient postal system in the world. (I believe that – I’ve lived overseas and seen businessmen routinely mail back-up letters because they know the first letter will cycle eternally in Postospace.)
There was much talk of the constitution origin of Federal Mail Service and the tradition “of a 228 year policy that mail delivery in our democracy is a basic and fundamental service by the government of the U.S.”.
This concept goes back to the Constitution, says the USPS letter. This statement is as indigestible in the human mind as a brick in the human stomach. Why would our letter-writing, freedom-loving founders in a world not yet blemished by Karl Marx – in a political environment fostering a weak union – arrogate a function like mail delivery to the Federal Government. Again, show me the proofs.
The point of the USPS essay was that remote locations could not be serviced by profit-making corporations or individuals. Sure, some greedy profit seeker would gobble up the New York market. but Keokuk, Iowa would have to rely on smoke signals or ex-Opera stars who would bellow information to Sioux City.
As stated by the USPS, “without the protection of the PES, mail volume from low-cost, high-profit areas would be targeted for carriage by Postal Service competitors, leaving the Postal Service the more expensive and difficult-to-serve areas”. Hmm, maybe, but why not give the marketplace a chance?
But wait. There’s hope for understanding the unjailed status of UPS/FED EX employees. Because in 1979, says my government letter, the post office suspended some PES provisions for “extremely urgent” letters. Thus allowing SOME competition.
(Can I charge my wife fifty cents to carry her invitation to my daughter’s wedding across town to cousin Susan? She says “it’s extremely urgent”. I have no idea.) The point is carefully underlined, that though exceptions were made in 1989 when the post office, due to a fat and prosperous year was in a good mood, some letters do NOT qualify for “any exception or suspensions to the PES”.
So, the mystery as deep and dark as those black holes in galactic space, and the imperialistic drive of the honeysuckle vine to take over your fence, and dark tendency of open-face jam and peanut butter sandwiches to fall on the kitchen floor, jam side down.
But still there’s hope because my two-page brochure about PES’s tells me that the exact, literal words that compose the prohibitions “are codified in title 18, US Code, 1693 through 1699 and title 39, US Code, 601 through 505.
Guess what my next request to my responsive and prompt Congressman will be?
{ 16 comments }
“If you pay an employee a fat salary, give him a prestigious title, and then pump up his package with perks like free mailing privileges…”
What free mailing purchases?
It’s called “franking”.
Legislators are allowed to send communications to their constituents at no cost to themselves.
I regularly receive letters from Congresschild Mike Rogers, Alabama 3rd District, outlining what a marvelous job he doing. He tells me that he’s doing everything he can to provide jobs, defend America – both home and abroad – and he does this all with free postage. Better yet, his missives seem to come with greater frequency and with more glamor during the campaign season….
Seems to me this is the real reason that the dysfunctional USPS continues: so it can deliver Washington’s propaganda.
Who pays for this free postage? Does it come out of the congressional budget or does the USPS absorb the cost?
Oh, I hope, I hope, that your next question is not, “So where is the income tax made mandatory in the law?” Fingers crossed.
Stephan, (if that question was directed at me) not only would I never ask anything so dumb, I also fail to see why you might suggest I would. Is there a connection between asking who pays for franking privileges & asking about weird income tax crankery?
xteve,
Kinsella was directing his comment to Ted Roberts.
I, too, find the income tax law deniers to be exasperating.
Stephan, I’m trying to say that the authorization and charter of the USPS is not so clear. (at least to a US congressman and local PO officials) They have a “monopoly” for example on first class mail – everybody repeats that as a truism. Not so clear. Evidently an exception was made, in certain cases for commercial carriers. Fedex and UPS CAN deliver your letter. I’ve talked repeatedly to PO officials and questioned our congressman. IT AINT SO CLEAR! I’m sure somewhere on the the web there’ll be a million words on the topic – which would still provoke questions. I try to say all this with a little humor. The next thing I’ll ask the congressman for will be the dialectic bureaucrateese included in those cited documents: “title 18, US code 1693 thru 1699, etc, etc. The letter from USPS officials was no more than a salestalk for the PO and the citation of these docs – no explanation of my simple question. (for example can I go into the inter-municipal mail business? ie, charge fifty cents to deliver your letter to Nashville? I dunno, do you?) Anyhow, sorry I was’t clearer – do good, ted
On Monday, August 7, 2006, at 09:17 AM, Stephan Kinsella wrote:
Yancy, the Senator was able to quote chapter and verse, I mean Title and Section, where the USPS is codified by law.
I would be very happy not to nay-say the applicability of the Income Tax if someone would quote chapter and verse, opps again I mean Title and Section, where my wages are taxable.
The only reference I’ve ever found was in the IRS’s own tax code, that said I had to be making my wages working in the “taxable revenue activities” of trade in alcohol, tobacco or firearms for them to be liable to the income tax.
No matter how frustrating you and Mr. Kinsella may find folks who focus on something as completely irrelevant as the elusive “enabling legislation”, since the government doesn’t actually need laws to do anything, it is just as frustrating to want to read those laws that lots of people talk about but that don’t appear to be written down anywhere.
I’m just not stupid enough to think that that will qualify in the government court as a defense against that same government.
Your mention of the Constitution and the status of the post office in those times reminded me of the biography I read about Ben Franklin recently. As many schoolkids may remember, Ben was America’s first postmaster general, and in fact held the title long before even 1776.
What I found interesting was the rent-seeking aspect of this position. Apparently, in the early 18th century, newspapers were mostly owned by the local postmaster. Apparently, the government postmaster position gave one a hammerlock on certain information flows and a news gathering network no one else had a similar level of access to. If you wanted to be the leading local paper, you tried to get yourself named postmaster, which is what Franklin did in Philadelphia as a business aid to his printing and newspaper business.
So Marxism may not have existed when the Constitution was written, but rent-seeking certainly did.
Warren, no I did not know that ol’ Ben was our first postmaster. The connection, you mention between the postmaster and journalist sorta makes sense. I guess a postmaster who might peek at the mail could gather a lot of interesting info. Thanks for your comment. ted
Mr. Howland,
Actually there really isn’t a “law” in regards to your wages being taxable. There isn’t “need” of one…and not necessarily because the state is naturally going to force you to pay. The reason you won’t find an actual law outside of IRS regulations is for two reasons:
1) Income Tax on any source of income was made “legal” by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution–”The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
2) I’m 90% certain that most tax related legislation starts with a phrase to the effect of “The commissioner shall” (or maybe it’s the sec. of the treasury…I can’t remember and don’t have time between tax returns to look it up), but basically Congress then delegates to the “authority” to IRS to actually carry out what Congress wants to happen (take our property through taxes). Hence you have the tax code, which fill two books, and the Regs which fill six…
Mr. Stunkel, most likely you are correct about the delegation of power. So it aught to be somewhere in those two books?
As I already said, I didn’t find any reference to plain “wages” in that code. The code was otherwise quite specific.
Income earned in the three taxable revenue activities: trade in Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Oh, and “capital gains”.
Curt,
I can’t believe you actually have me “defending” the tax code…I hate the tax code! Alas, I took a few minutes to look for you (being a CPA does kind of make one an addict to finding answers for folks). Wages are included under the general definition of gross income in Section 61(a)(1)
“Compensation for services, including fees, commisions, fringe benefits (whatever the HECK those are…in reality whatever the IRS decides they are), and similar items;” (I would at least consider wages to be compensation for services…)
If you’re looking for the actual use of the word wages along with its definition, you’d have to dig through the code until Chapter 24, Subchapter A, Section 3401, which is regarding the required “withholding” of wages by employers. There wages are defined as:
“…all remuneration (other than fees paid to a public official) for servies performed by an employee for his employer, including the cash value of all remuneration (including benefits) paid in any medium other than cash; except that…” (it goes on to list about 20 exceptions).
I agree with Ted on this one. It is interesting to see the congresspeople staff and the congressional liaison office of the government bureaus scramble to defend or try to explain the unspoken and mysterious ways “things have always been”. Having worked on Senate casework, handling things such as this “assignment”, I find it hillarious that all the congresspeople have the same SOP — i.e., send the letter to the congressional liaison office of the bureau in question, then send the response to the constituent. P.S., ask for a flag and ask for information regarding your representative’s position on a random bill # (pending in the House), as this will require a three different staffers to handle (a confusing task for any government office).
P.S., *in your next letter, also* ask for a flag and for information regarding your representative’s position on a random bill # (one that is currently pending in the House). This will require at least three different staffers to handle your request and, if you get lucky, you will get several letters responding to your request (potentially all signed with different handwriting!).
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