78-13-B2
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TranscriptEveryone I'm sure, has a story about mail delivery or non-delivery and it usually ends with the line, "What can we do about it?" I'll be right back. If prices in general had gone up at the same rate postal rates have climbed, we'd probably be marching on Washington. Certainly it would be cheaper to eat our money than to buy groceries with it, but Americans aren't complaining as much about the skyrocketing cost of stamps, as they are about the nose-diving quality of service. Already substitutes of various kinds are popping up as alternatives to the Post Office. Every time, however, that one of those substitutes involves itself with first class mail, delivery of letters or postcards, the law is invoked by postal authorities and each such operation is closed down. I reported to you some time ago about the young housewife in Rochester, New York who built a thriving business delivering business letters in downtown Rochester for 10 cents each, delivery same day guaranteed. The Post Office obtained an injunction and halted this invasion of its monopoly on first class delivery, even though it can't match price or delivery time. Now we get a story that suggests the postal authorities can truly see the sparrows fall. Millions of Americans grew up in this land getting their first lessons in free enterprise by mowing lawns, selling lemonade on the sidewalk or running errands. That may be going the way of the buggy whip and the village smithy. In Charleston, South Carolina, there's an enterprising young 14-year-old named Kenny McGuire. He was learning in that old-fashioned way about working and earning, but now he's had a lesson about the arrogance of big government. Congressman Eldon Rudd of Arizona has brought the story of Kenny McGuire to light and I'm grateful to him for doing so. Astride a bicycle, Kenny earned ten dollars delivering 80 wedding invitations. That was the beginning and the end of his delivery service. Postal authorities jumped in and grounded him for interfering with their legal monopoly over mail delivery. Kenny did the job faster than the post office can do it and he was certainly less expensive, by $2 for 80 invitations. Now does this mean that mom can't ask Johnny to run next door with a note to a neighbor for a recipe? Congressman Rudd says that Congress should break the postal service monopoly so that not only youngsters like Kenny but enterprising Americans of any age can provide the American people with the mail service they have a right to expect and which they're not getting. ABout 35 or 40 years ago, you could make a transcontinental phone call for about twenty five dollars and seventy cents and for that amount of money you could send almost thirteen hundred letters from one coast to the other. Now you can make that phone call for 54 cents cents or thereabouts and for that amount of money you can only send three letters. So the government keeps checking on and even suing the Bell system because they charge it's a monopoly. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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