Thursday, August 20, 2009

The Right Way to Amend the Constitution, part 9


This is part nine of an ongoing series of articles containing proposals for amendments to the Constitution. For someone who claims so fervently to be a “Constitutionalist”, how is it that I can be so eager to change the Constitution? Well, there are several reasons. For one thing, I believe that after the Bill of Rights, much damage was done by some of the amendments that were added and the legitimacy of some of their ratifications are questionable. Secondly, the Constitution has been violated so much that the necessity of further amendments is needed to resolve the resulting problems. But this should be done extremely cautiously. These amendments are extremely unlikely to ever be introduced, much less ratified, but hey, I can dream, can’t I?

Here is this week’s proposed amendment (subject to revision):

Section 1: The United States Post Office, all of its subsidiaries, and any mail delivery services under the control of the United States shall, within a period of three years from the date of the ratification of this amendment, be liquidated and the properties and facilities affected shall be sold. The proceeds from these sales shall be used to pay down the National Debt.

Section 2: All restrictions in the laws of the United States on the delivery of mail by private mail delivery services are hereby repealed.

Section 3: The Power to establish a Post office and Post roads shall no longer be vested in Congress.

This amendment is needed because the Post Office, like all other government run businesses is full of waste. Also, this is a subject not covered in the Liberty Amendment, because the Constitution does give the Congress the right to establish a Post Office. With the advent of email and the internet, this service is no longer as crucial as it once was. And if it was adopted, the employees of the Post Office would then be working for private corporations which would be less likely to selectively harass them for their political beliefs (the Hatch Act restricts political activities of Federal employees).

According to the Von Mises Institute, even Barack Obama says, “It's the post office that's always having problems …” in an inept attempt to downplay the effect of private businesses being driven out of business by government run businesses. What way to prove the point that government businesses are an OK thing! Read more of this story at:

http://mises.org/story/3646

Click here to read the next article in the series.

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