Monday, March 31, 2008

A Nation of Criminals:

My wife is a treasurer for an organization, and all of their expenditure receipts must come to her. Quite regularly, an envelope without a stamp drops through our mail slot with the latest batch of receipts. The man who delivers these letters to us is a federal criminal, but I doubt he knows it. It's possible that the law he is breaking turns more of us into federal fugitives from justice than any other. We're a nation of criminals.

In order to assure a reasonable income for the US Post Office, our government grants them a monopoly to deliver mail. One of the things that makes messenger services so expensive, is that they must actually pay the USPO the going rate for most of their own deliveries. Remarkably, that monopoly extends to your mailbox, and to the hole in your home that one is expected to push mail through. I confess to breaking this law many times when our kids were young, when there were party invitations to deliver. Have YOU broken this law?

2 comments:

Martin Langeland said...

Seems to me a distinction might be made. Granted our society with its alternation of parties with differing views makes for a set of laws that chafe all of us at one time or another, it is almost impossible to act within the law. Hence we are all without the law, or outlaws, for one act or another which act we defend with our own definition of common sense, which is nonsensical to others, maybe, and common to none.
But to be an outlaw is less than to be a criminal. A criminal lives by preying on others. Hence bank robbers might be criminals, but also might be outlaws. Bankers and financiers, e.g.: Bear Stearns, are criminals because they exist to charge fees and interest for the use of bits of computer memory that only has value because we agree that it represents the absurd fiction called money.
(Didn't they used to be Behr Stearns?)
--ml

tobyr21@gmail.com said...

Martin,
I don't care what we call them. My point is that I doubt any set of laws will stop the greedy from syphoning off illegal or unfair amounts of money. Just give them time to look at any laws and crack through them.
- PB