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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Phoenix who wrote (35873)	5/25/2000 4:09:00 PM
From: Augustus Gloop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 63513

1) It's legal because the government says it's legal <<they haven't abused the power>> Checked stamp prices over the past 5 years? I bet the OS for MSFT has gone up less in % terms than a stamp

To: The Phoenix who wrote (35873)	5/25/2000 4:16:00 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 63513

Post Office is a legal monopoly... they haven't abused the power Yes, they are a legal monopoly. But they surely have abused the power. They fought like hell to keep FedEx and the others from having an opportunity to compete, and even recently (a couple of years back) have fought to prevent the private services from getting into mass low-cost services on the grounds that their exception to the "legal" monopoly should be construed narrowly to apply only to "urgent" or highly time-sensitive mail. You must have never lived in Chicago. For many years our postal "workers" were such a joke that one could never rely on getting anything by mail. I had stock certificates, credit cards and the like outright stolen at the post office (the stolen credit cards were traced to a postal worker later), and the news was full of reports of piles of undelivered mail being found under railroad bridges and industrial sites throughout the city. Workers were too lazy to deliver them and management had no incentive to do anything about it. And yet, it was illegal for a competing service to offer to deliver any non-urgent letters. I could write pages about the electric utilities here, which also have wretched service and high expenses. It is the nature of monopolies, legal or otherwise, that the power will be abused. But until the abuse occurs, the law cannot effectively stop it.