Why the USPS is a modern dinosaur

How many of you have had the pleasure of going to a post office lately?  Actually, that is providing you can find one that is ever open when you might need to use it. 

I had a notice on my door today the post office attempted a delivery on a package I was expecting from amazon.com, that they shipped with "free shipping".  A signature was required.  The options were show up at my local post office, who's hours are 9am to 4pm Monday through Friday, or request redelivery when someone was at home between the hours of 9am until 6pm on the day of my choosing, Monday through Friday.  Well, for most of us 99% are working during those hours and it is neither practical for me to take off work for a day in hopes that the post office actually delivers the parcel or either be late or leave early so we can accommodate the bankers hours that the USPS employees enjoy.

I'm probably going to go to work late tomorrow just because I want this package before Thanksgiving, but I'll stipulate on any further orders that the USPS is not to be involved.

The post office is losing BILLIONS of dollars a year, while providing crappy service, complete with high government union salaries and pensions that have nothing to do with productivity.  This is a perfect example of how the government "businesses" fail us time and time again while private companies like FedEx and UPS provide great customer service, on time deliveries, even on cheaper ground service, and make it easy for pick-up and redelivery.  They both operate well into the black, while the USPS hellorages billions every year, with their diminishing first class mail business, bulk rate mail, and parcel post.  Bad customer service and limited office hours just sours the mix.  Postal employees are all high paid civil servants and under union contracts, we taxpayers still have to pay them even if they get laid off.

Other government services are just as bad.  Think how wonderful it is to deal with the Social Security Administration, or Medicare.  Think how wonderful all of our health care will be once ObamaCare kicks in with all it's sundry agencies, bureaucrats, and bean counters making decisions on what kind of medical care we will receive.  Will I, a MS sufferer be denied expensive drugs that my private insurer grudgingly allowed after a long protracted fight?  Or will it be, like President Obama said, "can't he just take a pill?"

The less the government is in my life the better off I am.

Third world diseases come back to America

Tuberculosis has been pretty much a thing of the past for most of us lucky to have been born in a modern first world country, in the later half of the 20th century, and I can not remember knowing a single person in the US of ever contracting the disease, however my 81 year old mother has tested positive on the skin test since she was a child.  In the third world countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America diseases such as TB, Chorea, and Typhoid are common place and bring about a high mortality rate in those countries.  The slums and squatters villages that often are in the most squalled conditions, and lack of modern medicine are a great contributor to the propagation of these horrible illnesses.

Well apparently, Occupy Atlanta, wants America to experience how bad that the 99% of the rest of the world have it.  Tuberculosis has broken out at the Atlanta Obamaville as this group of anarchists, communists, Marxists, hipsters, neo-Nazis, and other ragtag misfits continue to build their own squatters villages throughout the major American cities.  Is this the America that these people want us to become?  Or is this the one of the unintended consequences that result from dropping out of civil society and living like an animal within one of the richest countries ever to exist?

I've got to wonder how many of these stinky hippies have ever witnessed up close and personal real poverty and suffering?  How many have ever wondered where their next meal was coming from, or wondered where they could find a corner to sleep safely at night?  I'm willing to guess, apart from a few Marxist and apologist college professors, and hypocritical 1%ers like Michael Moore, have ever left the safety of their home country, where it is safe to protest against whatever they please. 

I personally have seen some of the worst living conditions in the world while traveling in third world countries, in many cases where their countries leaders live in luxury and talk in platitudes about how they love their people.  It is not a pretty picture.  We don't live in a "democracy" that the Occupiers demand, we live in a democratic republic where we elect our representatives in local, state, and national politics.  A true democracy means anarchy, and it has been a failure everywhere it has been tried.  The last place that gave lip service to this was Democratic Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the late1970's and 80's.

Might I suggest to the hippies who are occupying pieces of cities, going on criminal rampages, and spreading diseases long dormant in our civil society, to go join the Peace Corps, spend time in the Central African Republic, Bangladesh, and Honduras actually helping alleviate horrible diseases like TB, rather than spreading them back to the first world.