We live in interesting times. I was just reading about the U.S. Post Office and the fact that it lost $2.8 billion last year and is facing even larger losses this year, in spite of a rate increase and many measures they are taking to reduce costs.
This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me. I don’t know about you, but I receive almost all of my bills – and pay them – on-line. Ninety-eight percent of the mail I do get goes straight into the recycling bin, which means that direct mailers (at least in my case) are wasting money. Indeed, in this economy direct mailers have been cutting back on their mailings and moving more and more to the Internet in order to reduce costs. With this increasing reliance on electronic media, it would seem that the postal service will need to be scaled way back and/or transformed into something totally different from what it is today.
That issue brought another to mind, and not a new one at that. The manufacturing base in our country has been dwindling for quite some time and seems destined to continue in that direction. We have been buying manufacturing capacity from overseas at bargain rates compared to those in the States. Company after company in the U.S. has either shut down, scaled back or reconfigured to compensate for the loss of business, just as the Post Office is doing.
Call me a pessimist if you wish, but I start to worry about this downsizing of American capacities. I am becoming more and more concerned over the possibility that we may need something that we have lost, and need it in a hurry. I can think of at least a couple of examples.
The transmission of electronic information is subject to disruption by solar flares, as well as being vulnerable to intentional electronic jamming by those who may wish to do the U.S. harm. If electronic media were to be knocked out for any length of time by some such situation it would mean that all correspondence would have to go back to hard copy again. Maybe this is really silly thinking and there is no way this could happen, but it sure seems like a possibility. How could the Post Office ramp up in a hurry to compensate for the loss of electronic communication if they had gutted their operation to downsize and reduce cost?
The other scenario, and a much scarier one, is the possibility of a large-scale war. If we were to find ourselves at war with China, not only would we have to try to scale up our manufacturing capabilities in a damn big hurry, but we would have to worry about all the manufacturing capacity we have already helped China develop. Is this a silly worry? Is there really any likelihood that this could be a problem? Why would we want to risk finding out?
I’m afraid I don’t have any good answers to these two problems. It seems unlikely that we will be changing our business model in this country anytime soon and that China, India and other low wage countries will continue to create manufacturing capacity at the expense of our capabilities. We will continue to reduce the amount of printed material that gets mailed, thus forcing a reduction in the size of the Post Office.
Perhaps this is as it should be. All things change, and I don’t deny it. New technologies provide new and often unforeseen ways of doing things. Still, with the destruction of one’s own country potentially coming by one’s own hand, it seems to make sense to step back and evaluate the wider implications of change. I hate to go on faith that everything will turn out okay in the end, but to tell the truth, I don’t know what else we can do about the situation.