The basic characteristic of an overextended government is that its institutions are rotten. Take the U.S. Post Office, for instance. It lost $15.9 billion in 2012. That’s over $43.5 million per day – flushed down the toilet – for an entire year.
It’s no wonder why the Postal Service recently defaulted on a 5.6 billion retiree health benefit payment. The obvious options should be to reduce costs, privatize or close the Postal Service completely. But for a rotten institution the obvious options are never acceptable. Nor are they allowable.
In fact, the 220,000 member American Postal Workers Union wants to mutiny Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe for proposing ideas – like no Saturday delivery – to bring costs down. Like the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent eating its own tail, the union would rather consume itself than accept a benefit cut or two.
It is this type of blockheaded thinking that got institutions like the Postal Service into the disagreeable place they currently find themselves to begin with. Year after year, decade after decade, decision makers forgot to do one critically important thing. They forgot to think. Continue reading
