The Week

A Presidential commission has submitted the results of fifteen months of studying the Post Office. The commission concludes that politicalized management is incapable of efficiency—a point made a quarter-century ago by Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy—and recommends that the Post Office be converted into a non-profit government corporation in the TVA mode. A step away from bureaucratic management is a step in the right direction. A logical next step would be for the Government to relinquish its monopoly of the mails, and allow its non-profit postal corporation to compete with free-market carriers—like a corporation should.

There is no mistaking the main point the French electorate was making in the June elections: We do not want a Communist revolution! That proposition was affirmed, in substance, by a coalesced majority unprecedented in French parliamentary history. De Gaulle, after the collapse of his first plan for a vaguely worded national plebiscite, posed that as the issue for a general parliamentary election; the citizens, confronting the harsh realities of the revolutionary crisis in the streets, factories, rail lines, shops and public institutions, took de Gaulle’s slogan at face value, and shouted their reply. Whatever happens now in a battered France where, in C. L. Sulzberger’s image, “de Gaulle is the sun in France’s political sky, but that sun has now passed its apogee,” from this reply the nations of the West may take much comfort.

Featured Tags

Presidential Election

William F. Buckley Jr.

A Presidential commission has submitted the results of fifteen months of studying the Post Office. The commission concludes that politicalized management is incapable of efficiency—a point made a quarter-century ago by Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy—and recommends that the Post Office be converted into a non-profit government corporation in the TVA mode. A step away from bureaucratic management is a step in the right direction. A logical next step would be for the Government to relinquish its monopoly of the mails, and allow its non-profit postal corporation to compete with free-market carriers—like a corporation should.

There is no mistaking the main point the French electorate was making in the June elections: We do not want a Communist revolution! That proposition was affirmed, in substance, by a coalesced majority unprecedented in French parliamentary history. De Gaulle, after the collapse of his first plan for a vaguely worded national plebiscite, posed that as the issue for a general parliamentary election; the citizens, confronting the harsh realities of the revolutionary crisis in the streets, factories, rail lines, shops and public institutions, took de Gaulle’s slogan at face value, and shouted their reply. Whatever happens now in a battered France where, in C. L. Sulzberger’s image, “de Gaulle is the sun in France’s political sky, but that sun has now passed its apogee,” from this reply the nations of the West may take much comfort.