American Letter Mail Company

Talking about junk mail has just convinced me that the postal monopoly is totally worth it.

I would hate to have multiple companies completing to efficiently deliver ever larger piles of junk mail.

When there is a monopoly, more densely populated areas cross subsidise more sparsely populated areas. If there isn't a monopoly then companies are incentivised to pick and choose whos mail to carry making it more expensive for everyone else.

Sweden had a "letter monopoly" up until 1993 - https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postlagen

The post office is in the US Constitution in Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 saying "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads". This has lead to rulings and decisions that give some monopoly situations.

FedEx, UPS, Amazon, and private couriers are all active in the letter and package delivery business. The USPS doesn't have a monopoly, at least not in the strict text-book sense of the word.

USPS just delivers letter mail at much lower rates than the others. And does so at a fixed rate to any address within the US, whether that's a neighbor across the street or a family member in a tiny town in the mountains.

Horses are still just as expensive as they were. Railroads are faster now, and more efficient through diesel-electric engines.

The past was extremely poor.

I think we can conclude advances in transportation technology made it cheaper to deliver the mail. Trains, trucks, planes.

First of all, government monopoly is not the same thing as government regulation.

Secondly, Lysander Spooner was a libertarian socialist. Libertarian socialism rejects economic control by the state. You’re probably thinking of social democracy when you think of socialism, because social democracy is what you see on the news. Social democracy is only one branch of the socialist movement (or movements).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

Socialism does not equal government regulation. It's true that many practical implementations have resulted in a big government, most famously communism relies on centralised control. But to take the opposite site of the spectrum, anarchism rejects the idea of government.

In the same vein, conservatism is not automatically pro small government. For instance in recent years the British tories seems to be in favour of heavy government control/regulation.

There is a long history of anti-government socialist movements. Spooner was of the opinion that governments themselves are illegitimate in how they come to be and that in particular the US Constitution was a charade. I had to look up the First International, I found this bit of trivia interesting: "In 1872, it split in two over conflicts between statist and anarchist factions and dissolved in 1876." I don't know when Spooner joined, but he was 68 when it dissolved.

If you want to read about him, his works, and read his works. Punch his name into google with the word Mises tacked on the end. You will find that Libertarians(the Anarcho-Capitalist ones) tend to hold him in high regard for his actions and his writings.

Lysander was a Libertarian, and Anarchist, and a Socialist.

His polital opinions were (and are today) very rare in that he was Left libertarian, where most people that label themselves libertarian are Right Libertarians.

Also most people that label themselves Socialist, are Authoritarians Socialists (meaning socialism via government violence)

Lysander Spooner is one of my favorite philosophers, his work No Treason the constitution of no authority was one of the first things of his I read, and still find it fascinating

You can also be an anarcho-socialist. It’s just authoritarian socialism that’s most often described as socialism.

Socialism just describes the idea that the means of production is owned in common (by the government for authoritarian socialism, or by the workers themselves for libertarian socialism) rather than capital investors, and distributing the profits of labour among the workers who produced it rather than to the capital owners.

socialism used to be opposed to state intervention into social affairs. The US especially had a tradition of anti-state socialists, largely on the grounds that the exploitation of workers in capitalism was believed by them to occur predominantly when Government intervenes on behalf of businesses in favor of the capitalist.

The other major american socialist was benjamin tucker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Tucker) who wrote about the schism between state socialism and traditional socialism, predicting, in effect, that Stalinism, Maoism, and Chavezism would be the natural consequence of Marxism, a good half century before they happened: https://panarchy.org/tucker/state.socialism.html

Interestingly Spooner and Tucker fought tooth and nail over the issue of IP (Spooner pro- and Tucker anti-) in a series of letters which presage conversations we're still having today.

In very broad strokes, socialism is towards no private property (gained either through use, improvement, or profit-making), and libertarianism is against powerful governments. The two aren't inherently incompatible.

How is that not competition?

The USPS does not deliver to every address in the US.

I don’t know what specifically causes the USPS to deliver to a specific area, but there are entire incorporated cities, some with reasonably large population and density, that don’t receive mail at all except to the local post office. Even UPS and FedEx’s low-cost all-but-the-last-mile services regularly lose packages because they hand them off to the USPS.

>>so much as skim off the profitable routes.

They were not even trying to do that, Lysander formed the company with the expressed purpose that the government would sue him. he wanted to get the monopoly protection law for the USPS ruled unconstitutional