The folks at the legendary conservative magazine, Human Events, just sent out a fund-raising appeal containing information I thought you'd be very interested in learning. Then, at the conclusion of the post, I urge you to make some proper responses....Just recently, the federal government's taxpayer-subsidized mail-delivery monopoly, aka the United States Postal Service, hit us with a one-two punch of postal-rate and fee increases that have driven up our delivery costs by over 20 percent. First, our per-copy postal rate will rise 16.86 percent. Second, we're being hit with a brand-new "container fee" (don't ask – it's absurd) that will hike our total increase to 20.3 percent...
It's outrageous enough that the U.S.P.S. can jack up our rates like this without fearing any loss of our business to more cost-efficient competitors – something it can do ONLY because federal law effectively protects it from private competition. But what really burns me up is that the new rate system was designed in part by lobbyists for liberal media giant Time Warner and other large publishers to benefit themselves at the expense of smaller competitors such as Human Events.
So instead of Time Warner's mailing costs ratcheting up like ours, the cost of delivering liberal Time magazine and other Big Media publications will barely increase at all – even decrease in some cases. Meanwhile, smaller publications such as ours, which can't afford expensive lobbyists, get hammered. Some will be forced out of business altogether.
Economists call the kind of behavior that Time Warner and the Big Media conglomerates are engaged in "rent seeking" – using government to gain advantage over competitors. And that economic advantage can obviously translate into political advantage as well. By "gaming the system" in their favor, these liberal media conglomerates have taken a big step toward silencing their conservative opposition.
This means there's much more at stake here than the survival of Human Events. Free speech, and the right of conservatives to get their message out on the same terms as liberals, is also at stake.
And if the liberal media giants such as Time Warner get away with this ploy, the consequences for the future of our country – beginning with the upcoming presidential elections in 2008 – could be dire...
This is obviously a situation in need of serious and immediate redress. I encourage you to write your political representatives and urge them to put a stop to these "rent seeking" arrangements AND to break up the postal service's monopoly and let free enterprise bring down consumer costs. Contact info is available right here.
And, if you're so inclined to help out Human Events in the short term, you can do so here.
