The post office & the 3 carriers you mentioned are not in the same category. Since DHL, FedX & UPS don’t deliver our mail door to door, they are able to make a profit as global delivery companies. They are also more efficient & effective than the PO. The PO doesn’t even have its own aircraft. Although the PO has started to pick up packages, pickups are made only during normal mail delivery. Prior to that, customers had to wait in line at the PO. The delivery workers at the private companies are paid under an incentive program & don’t close their windows when it’s time for a break. DHL stopped all their domestic shipments 1/09 & laid off thousands of workers.

If there is socialized health care, there will still be a few private health care workers since the legislature, unions & federal employees will probably be exempt, allowing for the rich to also patronize them.

I think we should all care about our fellow Americans being able to keep their jobs. It’s sad when anyone looses a job, worse when a business goes under & devastating to our economy when almost an entire industry shuts down, especially when it’s replaced with more govt. bureaucracy. Personally I believe in capitalism & took an oath in my profession to preserve the free enterprise system.

PS The PO still uses typewriters & ditto machines but thankfully gave up the horse & buggies.

All Falling Down . . .

Obama’s mega-borrowing is predicated on a rather thin margin of safety. We can service nearly $2 trillion in additional debt this year—on top the of the existing $11 trillion—only because interest rates are so low.

But as a veteran of the near usury of the 1970s and early 1980s, I see no reason why interest rates won’t shoot up to 10% once the economy recovers and the U.S. has to convince lenders to buy our paper in an inflationary spiral. In other words, we could fork out each year about $150-200 billion in interest costs on our annual red ink, in addition to paying annually another trillion dollars to service the existing debt. (We forget that many of us young people in the 1970s and 1980s simply never bought anything new due to high interest: my first new car was not purchased until 1989 when interest was only 7.2% on it; my parents bought a small condo in 1980 for the unbelievably low rate of 8.8%, due only to redevelopment incentives in a bad neighborhood of Fresno. Inflation will be back, even in this quite different age of globalized competition and low wages.)

When Obama talks of a trillion here for health care, a trillion there for cap-and-trade, it has a chilling effect. Does he include the cost of interest? Where will the money came from? Who will pay the interest? Has he ever experienced the wages of such borrowing in his own life? Did he cut-back and save for his college or law school tuition, with part-time jobs? Did he ever run a business and see how hard it was to be $200 ahead at day’s end?

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/allfallingdown/

but forgets to mention private insurance companies do the same thing, but more frequently and with less cause. Then, they rescind people from their rolls whom they determine might cost them more in benefits than they bring in premiums. Does Medicare do that?