The air is toxic in this sweaty mine shaft where we scratch for the ore democracy used to be made of, my fine feathered friends.  The federal government, once a defender of human rights (as when, a century belatedly, it battled the Klan) and keeper of many valuable public institutions (schools high on that list) and much of the nation’s infrastructure, keeps begging these days to be drowned in a bathtub.  The Free Market, the private sector, is constantly held up (by those with the money to know best) as the best arbiter of what is important and what is worth drowning in a bathtub.  After all, mustn’t we all admit that it’s the extremely wealthy and successful who have the expertise and proven success to tell the rest of us the best thing to do in every sector of  life?

A few days before Christmas, when lines in the post office can be an hour or more long, I got a nice symbol, in my mailbox, of our tax dollars at work.  A large envelope from the post office, with a clear plastic window on one side, showing me the partially mangled envelope I’d sent to my landlord with my rent check for December a week or two earlier.  My landlord’s printed address clearly visible through the window, as is my return address.  The stamp has been cancelled.   The reason my landlord did not cash my rent check this month is that the U.S. Post Office was keeping it, after it was partially ruffled in a government machine, to considerately return to me with this important message on the back:

So, this citizen will spend perhaps $15 on Monday to let Fed Ex do, overnight, the work a 45 cent stamp, and the full faith and credit of our U.S. Postal Service, could not accomplish in two weeks.  And resist the foolish, if understandable, urge to do anything whatsoever to respond to the moronic government robot that signs itself, with sincere regret, after an appropriately Newspeak arbeit macht frei taken directly from the Free Market best practices book,  my postmaster.