Rockwell on Obama "going postal" in his analogy between the USPS and health care "reform"

Here's Lew Rockwell with an excellent piece on Obama's reference to the Post Office and mail services as an analogy for a (subsidized) "public option" in health insurance (hat tip: Rick Robbins for the 'going postal' reference!)....

Rockwell opens by providing a transcript of Obama's answer to a high school student's question about the government's provision of health services and its impact on private services.

"How can a private company compete against the government? My answer is that if the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining, meaning that taxpayers aren't subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services, and a good network of doctors, just like private insurers do, then I think private insurers should be able to compete."

"They do it all the time. If you think about it, UPS and Fed-Ex are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems.... there is nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private marketplace. As long as it is not set up where the government is being subsidized by the taxpayers so that even if they are providing a good deal, we keep having to pony up more and more money."

To Rockwell's commentary:

Now, these comments are nothing short of incredible. The Post Office has been on the loser list for many decades. Most recently, it has been included on the GAO's high-risk list, increasing its debt to $10.2 billion and incurring a cash shortfall of $1 billion.

Note that the post office is not being shut down for this mess. On the contrary, it is being subsidized not only with tax dollars but, most importantly, with laws... (Rockwell cites: I.83.1696, 39.I.6.606, immunity from antitrust action and criminal liability, and "the whole Post Office Gosplan".)

Only the government is permitted to deliver first-class letters. How do UPS and Fed-Ex get away with it? They slip through a hole in the law by delivering packages, not mail. And it wasn't easy to survive even then....The freedom of UPS and Fed-Ex to operate at all is hard won. But the government has succeeded in destroying the private marketplace in the one area that government monopolizes by law. It took the innovation of digital messaging to finally horn in on that area....

Therefore Obama is right in a strange way: private enterprise has triumphed and government service is terrible. Everyone knows this. It is utterly preposterous that a government mail service exists at all. There is no theory of economics that supports it....It should be immediately abolished and private enterprise should take over....

But perhaps Obama meant to suggest that the reason the Post Office is so bad is because it has to compete with private enterprise. If he meant that, he lives in a socialist fantasy land, and we have a very dangerous man on our hands....

How can a private company compete against the government? Simply because government is so terrible at what it does that even a private company that is beaten down and attacked and competed against with all the tax dollars in the world will do better than the government. It is true in mail and it is true in health care....

Another point that needs to be addressed is Obama's claim that the government service will operate just like the private service, with self-sustaining financing....If the goal is to get government to operate like a private service, what is the value added by having it provided by the government in the first place? The only reason for a government service is precisely to provide financial support for an operation that is otherwise unsustainable, else there would be no point in the government's involvement at all....

The wrong path is to make health care run the same way as the post office. Obama seems to favor the latter path, even though he admits that it is the least well-performing one. This is surely the definition of fanaticism. If the mobs aren't angry, they should be.