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Government Post – Is the American Brand Better Than Ours?

The Myth of the Post Office, or a Tale of Postal Perfidy

By

April 4, 2001

On February 15, I ordered an out of print pamphlet from an online bookseller called Oddball Books, based in La La Land, People’s Democratic, Liberated, Socialized, Tummy Tucked and Sometimes Electrified Republic of California. I requested that it be sent to my post office box here in the People’s Hillaryized Republic of Gotham. Oddball duly informed me by e-mail that it was mailed through the Post Office’s Priority Mail service on Friday, February 16. Impressed by the efficiency of private enterprise, but aware that using the government’s mail was risky business, I eagerly anticipated the arrival of a rare work by Frank Chodorov, albeit with some uneasiness. This would fill a lacuna in my library, and amuse the dust mites that call it home.

Priority Mail advertises two to three-day delivery, so I expected to receive it by Wednesday, February 21. In the past the Post Office has fraudulently compared this service with FedEx and UPS, despite the fact that the latter have online tracking and real accountability, something that is as alien to the Post Office as honesty is to a politician, and as the love of liberty is to a Puritan. After two weeks elapsed without receiving the package, I e-mailed Oddball inquiring after its whereabouts. The proprietor responded that he would check with the Post Office.

Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, despite the best efforts of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell to demonstrate that history does not proceed in vacuo, and that real people (government miscreants and their crony capitalist friends) have reasons to thwart the free market for their own gain, and to cover their tracks with bogus court history. But when I identify the missing pamphlet as “The Myth of the Post Office,” you might understand my suspicion that maybe there is a conspiracy afoot, with the Post Office as Ground Zero.

A few days later, the proprietor of the book service informed me that he had insured the package and was filling out forms that the Post Office required to conduct its own investigation. (A Post Office investigation of a botched delivery sounds like a military war crimes tribunal you wonder who should be investigating whom.) He was going to send me some forms to fill out also. Great! Would they be in triplicate? As of about two weeks later, April 3, I haven’t received them. Maybe they have a worse service than Priority Mail! Sounds like they ll need two investigations, and a slightly bigger budget to cover both. And don’t forget — yet more funding to cover the cost of the lost paperwork. (That big tax reduction proposed by Jim Ostrowski appears to be in some jeopardy, and we haven’t even got to the Department of Labor [which does no labor]. After all, it costs the Post Office at least 50 percent more than private enterprise to deliver a package.)

A couple of days ago, I requested a refund, which I hope to receive soon. I also informed Oddball of my thinking about insuring packages entrusted to the Post Office. It occurred to me that such a practice is similar to posting a sign in front of a bank that says “No Guards or Security Systems Inside,” which would be an open sesame to bank robbers. Flagging a package sent through the government’s snail mail for insurance tells a postal bureaucrook that it’s a valuable package. Which Priority Mail package is he going to steal one that’s uninsured or one that’s insured? The irony is, as I pointed out to Oddball, that the package probably would have had a better chance of arriving safely uninsured.

At least I have a reprint of “The Myth of the Post Office,” which appeared as chapter 16 in Frank Chodorov’s book One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist. There is some consolation in rereading this essay now. It seems that I also have to go back to school on conspiracy theories, starting with the Rockwell-edited collection The Irrepressible Rothbard. And I’m having UPS deliver this time, because a tome is a terrible thing to waste, especially on a mindless bureaucrook.

From Lew Rockwell, here.

Humans Are the Ultimate Resource (Excluding Politicians)

Overpopulation Hoax

By

May 31, 2017

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” He predicted that mankind’s birthrate would outstrip our ability to grow food and would lead to mass starvation. Malthus’ wrong predictions did not deter Stanford University professor Paul Ehrlich from making a similar prediction. In his 1968 best-seller, “The Population Bomb,” which has sold more than 2 million copies, Ehrlich warned: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” This hoax resulted in billions of dollars being spent to fight overpopulation.

According to the standard understanding of the term, human overpopulation occurs when the ecological footprint of a human population in a specific geographical location exceeds the carrying capacity of the place occupied by that group. Let’s look at one aspect of that description — namely, population density. Let’s put you, the reader, to a test. See whether you can tell which country is richer and which is poorer just by knowing two countries’ population density.

North Korea’s population density is 518 people per square mile, whereas South Korea’s is more than double that, at 1,261 people per square mile. Hong Kong’s population density is 16,444, whereas Somalia’s is 36. Congo has 75 people per square mile, whereas Singapore has 18,513. Looking at the gross domestic products of these countries, one would have to be a lunatic to believe that smaller population density leads to greater riches. Here are some GDP data expressed in millions of U.S. dollars: North Korea ($17,396), South Korea ($1,411,246), Hong Kong ($320,668), Somalia ($5,707), Congo ($41,615) and Singapore ($296,967).

The overpopulation hoax has led to horrible population control programs. The United Nations Population Fund has helped governments deny women the right to choose the number and spacing of their children. Overpopulation concerns led China to enact a brutal one-child policy. Forced sterilization is a method of population control in some countries. Nearly a quarter-million Peruvian women were sterilized. Our government, through the U.N. Population Fund, is involved in “population moderation” programs around the world, including in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia.

The entire premise behind population control is based on the faulty logic that humans are not valuable resources. The fact of business is that humans are what the late Julian L. Simon called the ultimate resource. That fact becomes apparent by pondering this question: Why is it that Gen. George Washington did not have cell phones to communicate with his troops and rocket launchers to sink British ships anchored in New York Harbor? Surely, all of the physical resources — such as aluminum alloys, copper, iron ore and chemical propellants — necessary to build cellphones and rocket launchers were around during Washington’s time. In fact, they were around at the time of the cave man. There is only one answer for why cell phones, rocket launchers and millions of other things are around today but were not around yesteryear. The growth in human knowledge, human ingenuity, job specialization, and trade led to industrialization, which, coupled with personal liberty and private property rights, made it possible. Human beings are valuable resources, and the more we have of them the better.

The greatest threat to mankind’s prosperity is government, not population growth. For example, Zimbabwe was agriculturally rich but, with government interference, was reduced to the brink of mass starvation. Any country faced with massive government interference can be brought to starvation. Blaming poverty on overpopulation not only lets governments off the hook but also encourages the enactment of harmful, inhumane policies.

Today’s poverty has little to do with overpopulation. The most commonly held characteristics of non-poor countries are greater personal liberty, private property rights, the rule of law and an economic system closer to capitalism than to communism. That’s the recipe for prosperity.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

מה יאמרו הגוים או למה יאמרו הגוים

הרב כהנא על חג החנוכה לפעמים צריך אלימות

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From YouTube, here.

Terrorism: Who, Whom?

Are We Fighting Terrorism, Or Creating More Terrorism?

By

Ron Paul Institute

May 30, 2017

When we think about terrorism we most often think about the horrors of a Manchester-like attack, where a radicalized suicide bomber went into a concert hall and killed dozens of innocent civilians. It was an inexcusable act of savagery and it certainly did terrorize the population.

What is less considered are attacks that leave far more civilians dead, happen nearly daily instead of rarely, and produce a constant feeling of terror and dread. These are the civilians on the receiving end of US and allied bombs in places like Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.

Last week alone, US and “coalition” attacks on Syria left more than 200 civilians dead and many hundreds more injured. In fact, even though US intervention in Syria was supposed to protect the population from government attacks, US-led air strikes have killed more civilians over the past month than air strikes of the Assad government. That is like a doctor killing his patient to save him.

Do we really believe we are fighting terrorism by terrorizing innocent civilians overseas? How long until we accept that “collateral damage” is just another word for “murder”?

The one so-called success of the recent G7 summit in Sicily was a general agreement to join together to “fight terrorism.” Have we not been in a “war on terrorism” for the past 16 years? What this really means is more surveillance of innocent civilians, a crackdown on free speech and the Internet, and many more bombs dropped overseas. Will doing more of what we have been doing do the trick? Hardly! After 16 years fighting terrorism, it is even worse than before we started. This can hardly be considered success.

They claim that more government surveillance will keep us safe. But the UK is already the most intrusive surveillance state in the western world. The Manchester bomber was surely on the radar screen. According to press reports, he was known to the British intelligence services, he had traveled and possibly trained in bomb-making in Libya and Syria, his family members warned the authorities that he was dangerous, and he even flew terrorist flags over his house. What more did he need to do to signal that he may be a problem? Yet somehow even in Orwellian UK, the authorities missed all the clues.

But it is even worse than that. The British government actually granted permission for its citizens of Libyan background to travel to Libya and fight alongside al-Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi. After months of battle and indoctrination, it then welcomed these radicalized citizens back to the UK. And we are supposed to be surprised and shocked that they attack?

The real problem is that both Washington and London are more interested in regime change overseas than any blowback that might come to the rest of us back home. They just do not care about the price we pay for their foreign policy actions. No grand announcement of new resolve to “fight terrorism” can be successful unless we understand what really causes terrorism. They do not hate us because we are rich and free. They hate us because we are over there, bombing them.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.