I confess to a Netflix addiction. After a long day, I arrived home one recent evening eagerly anticipating the half dozen “West Wing” DVDs scheduled to arrive in my mailbox. And yet, I turned the key to an empty mail slot. A week later I learned from a neighbor that they arrived in his mailbox, the fifth such error my friendly postman has made in the last two months. This is a result of the ineffectiveness of the government’s mailbox monopoly.
If this were any other industry, I would cancel the mail service and sign up with a competitor (or pay Netflix to do so). But address-holders are not permitted to pay, or even authorize, another party to put something in a mailbox (that they have purchased but are not permitted to own) designed exclusively for their use and benefit. What is more, last week the U.S. Postal Service increased the price of stamps for this inferior service.
We take it for granted that the Postal Service has no viable competitor for regular light mail, but this is not a natural phenomenon. Federal law makes it a crime for anyone other than a postal employee to put something in my mailbox, and for anyone but me to take things out.
There is little legal justification for the fact that if a piece of junk mail is stolen from my mailbox, the U.S. attorney has jurisdiction, but if a newly delivered package is stolen from my doorstep the federal government doesn’t care.
Government control of my mailbox simply effectuates a regulatory monopoly on mail delivery. The only justification for a government-regulated monopoly is that an industry is a natural monopoly, a term economists use for an industry in which it is cheaper to have one provider due to high up-front costs, and perhaps this was the case in Benjamin Franklin’s day.
But consider the success of UPS and FedEx. If these two companies can deliver bulk mail to any address in the U.S., why couldn’t they deliver light mail? Thus my suspicion that federal law is really acting as a regulatory subsidy to the Postal Service.
Let me anticipate one objection: privacy rights. Critics would question how mailbox owners could limit unwanted access or junk mail. One answer is to let the address holder choose. There could be a default rule of the status quo, no access to anyone but the Postal Service, unless an address holder specifically opted out and permitted another party access to his or her mailbox.
For instance, consider the effectiveness of the federal do-not-call program, a rare jewel of bureaucratic ingenuity. An agency, such as the Federal Trade Commission, could administer an opt-in program for mailbox access.
Address holders would sign authorization forms, on paper or online, allowing companies registered with the FTC, let’s call them Registered Federal Mail Affiliates (or RFMAs, bureaucrats love acronyms) to access their mailboxes.
RFMAs delivering to unregistered addresses would be subject to fines, and non-RFMAs accessing mailboxes would still face the penalty of mail-tampering laws.
Competition would improve the quality and pricing of Postal Service. Competition might even urge the Postal Service to implement delivery charges based on distance.
Postal delivery will not be nearly as cushy a gig under this scheme.But consumers, taxpayers and investors in private package delivery services stand to benefit in financial profits, cost cuts and quality of service. We must revisit the conventional wisdom of mail service if we are to eliminate this government monopoly; it’s my mailbox, it should be my choice.
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J.W. Verret is an assistant professor of corporate law at George Mason University School of Law.
