Bookshelf

The Last Monopoly: Privatizing the Postal Service for the Information Age
edited by Edward L. Hudgins, Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996, 138 pp.

"The check is in the mail" was once an excuse you gave your creditors when your bill was past due. In recent years, however, it's been more likely than ever to be the truth. In an age where an hour can mean the difference between a closed deal and a closed door, what once may have been an acceptable delivery time for the post office just won't cut it anymore.

On June 14, 1995, the Cato Institute held a conference titled "The Last Monopoly: Privatizing the Postal Service for the Information Age." This book by the same name features twelve of the papers presented at that conference, as well as an introduction by Edward Hudgins, Cato's director of regulatory studies.

Aside from a chapter by Postmaster General Marvin Runyon and one by American University professor Murray Comarow, the book overwhelmingly favors privatizing the U.S. Postal Service and eliminating its legal monopoly over first-class mail delivery. Even Runyon acknowledges that "it is time to find the right amount of deregulation that will let the Postal Service operate like a business and compete on equal footing with other couriers and alternative communications."

Most of the authors in this collection identify the Postal Service's monopoly status as the primary source of its inefficiency. Peter Ferrara, author of Free the Mail: Ending the Postal Monopoly, estimates that the Postal Service, which delivers the mail on average 15 percent slower than it did twenty years ago, charges double what it would if it were subjected to competitive forces.

Other authors, such as Stephen Gibson, executive director of the Bionomics Institute, point to revolutionary communications technology such as fax machines and electronic mail that are gradually rendering postal services obsolete.

The book's final part features two chapters by policymakers who present concrete postal privatization proposals. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), proposes that the government "turn the Postal Service into the world's largest employee-owned company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)." Ohio University economics professor Douglas K. Adie prefers instead that the Postal Service be broken up into smaller, competing companies to "ensure that true competition results."

However Postal Service privatization is best accomplished, almost all of the contributors to this volume would agree with Adie's claim that the really important question "is not whether [the Postal Service] should be privatized, but how."

--Lee Kessler
Lee Kessler is editor of Intellectual Ammunition.

Science, Nonscience, and Nonsense: Approaching Environmental Literacy
by Michael Zimmerman, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 220 pp.

Despite its promising title, this book is not about separating science from nonsense. Rather, its author is content to simply repeat the many myths, legends, and frightening (but unfounded) predictions of the most radical and anti-market environmentalists.

Mr. Zimmerman manages to produce a 220-page book on environmental literacy without mentioning the rules of epidemiology, toxicology, or ecology. (Unless the truism that "everything is connected to everything else" counts as a rule of ecology.) Indeed, Mr. Zimmerman does not identify a single environmental problem that he would say has been exaggerated or overhyped.

Mr. Zimmerman presents an "Alice in Wonderland" world where the Alar scare of 1989, which frightened millions of Americans into throwing away perfectly safe apples and applesauce, is a case study in proper consumer education. Logging of any kind is "plunder[ing] our national forests." Manmade chemicals--which experts say may be responsible for 2 or 3 percent, at most, of all human cancer deaths in the U.S.--are elevated by a not-so-clever sleight of hand into a suspect in "between one-third and two-thirds of all cancers."

In Mr. Zimmerman's world, photosynthesis apparently does not occur, since he insists "the world is a finite place, and all of its physical resources are in limited supply." Paul Ehrlich's predictions of global devastation, Rachel Carson's predictions of a "silent spring," and Samuel Epstein's predictions of a "cancer epidemic" are all taken seriously in Mr. Zimmerman's world, although in ours we know they were proven wrong in the past and their authors no longer are credible.

Is there controversy over whether human activity may be altering the global climate? In Mr. Zimmerman's world, "virtually none exists." In our world, scientific journals regularly question the reliability of global climate models, temperature records, and such poorly understood processes as the role of oceans in moderating temperature changes and absorbing greenhouse gases.

The Endangered Species Act gets false credit for saving six species from extinction. (In five cases, additional populations were discovered; in the sixth [the California gray whale], action by Mexico was responsible for the species' recovery.)

This disappointing book has only one redeeming feature that I can think of. Mr. Zimmerman argues persuasively that electric "bug zappers" don't really work to kill mosquitos, which are drawn by the smell of human breath and perspiration rather than ultraviolet light. Finally, some science instead of nonsense!

--Joseph L. Bast
Joseph L. Bast is president of The Heartland Institute and coauthor of Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1996).