Our Founders had vision: the postal system in this country is so important that it’s actually included in the U.S. Constitution — Section 8 says that only Congress shall have the power to “to establish post offices and post roads.”

Why Congress? And why not the states? Because the Founders knew that unlike the situation in Europe, a single postal system with one set of standards and one set of prices could bind the national together. All citizens, no matter where they lived, would pay the same fee for the same services.

No less important, the U.S. postal system requires no payments from recipients. We have a sender-funded delivery system, meaning that senders take all the financial risk when they send materials through the mailstream. (In contrast, email recipients pay — that’s why it doesn’t matter if a spammer broadcasts 10 messages or a million emails, the cost is about the same.)

This is a site which says that the mailstream is important to the country, that we as a Nation are not so wealthy that we can afford to lose millions of jobs inside our borders and that a reasonable discussion of the mailing system is helped by the availability of factual information and data.

Technorati Tags: Constitution, economics, Founders, government, mail, Mail & Jobs, vision