Free the Mail

This comprehensive collection of essays by prominent policy makers, scholars, and analysts provides the most persuasive justification to date of the need to completely overhaul the U.S. Postal Service by privatizing the delivery of mail. Contributors call for an end of the federal postal monopoly and offer prescriptions for privatizing the Postal Service that will benefit all stakeholders, including the 800,000 Postal Service employees. The contributors do, however, differ on how, given practical political pressures, to dismantle the postal monopoly and abolish the ties between the federal government and the Postal Service. Some propose gradual steps, beginning with third class mail, to achieve those goals. Others would eliminate the postal monopoly and privatize the Postal Service all at once by issuing stock in the Postal Service to all current postal workers and managers.

Peter J. Ferrara, former associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute, is general counsel and chief economist for Americans for Tax Reform. A leading Social Security scholar, he is the author of Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction and several other books on Social Security. He served in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1983 and as associate deputy attorney general of the United States in 1992–93. He has also practiced law and taught at George Mason University School of Law.