McPheet.com

Those of you who know me (probably all of the people reading this, at
this early stage) would likely describe me as even-tempered and slow to
anger. Generally, it’s true: it takes a lot to make me mad. But by the end
of my visit to the U.S. Post Office in Redmond, WA today, I was steaming.
Two things really bugged me.

* * * * *

Some of you should NOT have children.

My wife and I are regrettably tardy in our Christmas shipping this year.
In fact, I had so many packages to send that I had to make two passes
through the lengthy line at the post office. Each time, I got to observe
parents who are not qualified.

During my first wait, the woman behind me had two kids. At first, I
thought they were a boy and a girl, but I heard the mother tell the younger
one that his name, Haley, was usually a girl’s name these days, but that the
only male Haleys she knew now were the youngster and
Haley Joel Osment.
Thus, strike one — the woman intentionally gave her child an opposite-sex
name, a potential cause of poor self-esteem (according to
Zig
Ziglar). I had thought Haley was a girl, because of his nearly shoulder
length hair. Strike two — letting or making a little boy (maybe six years
old) look like a girl. Then the older child, perhaps seven or eight years
old, dropped an entire box of green tea bags, which she picked up for him.
The boy had brought the green tea with him inside the post office for no
discernable reason. She finally got him to put all the tea back in its box,
but Haley was running around in the post office lobby while this was going
on. Strike three — not imposing any discipline on her children.

I’ll admit that it may be only my own prejudices that makes strike two a
problem, but the woman is mistaken if she thinks that letting her children
run around uncontrolled is doing them a favor. As a parent, it’s your
responsibility to teach self-discipline to your children. This accomplishes
three things. First, it prevents other people being annoyed with your kids
(which is just common courtesy). Second, it helps them develop the resources
to get ahead in life. Third, it makes your life much easier and makes being
around your children that much more pleasant later on, when they get to be
teenagers.

This last was the problem with the parent two places ahead of me in line
during my second wait. This gentleman had a daughter about three or four
years old. She ran over to a display of postcards and such and was looking
at them, picking them up off the shelf and putting them back in the wrong
places. He called to her in a soft voice about a half-dozen times, which she
either could not hear or deliberately ignored. He then left his place in
line temporarily to go over and pick her up, carrying her the rest of the
time he was in the post office. No chastising occurred.

Congratulations, mister. By failing to follow through and insist that she
obey you, you’ve successfully taught your child to ignore your instructions.
Guess what you have to look forward to when she’s a teenager.

The process of parenting, it seems to me, is a gradual transfer of
responsibility and independence to your child. In

Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch’s God voice says that
one of the objectives in relationships is to cause those who are dependent
on you to no longer be dependent on you. From my point of view, and with
respect to your children, this means training them to be able to survive and
thrive on their own, which includes teaching them self-control. Based on
limited observation, neither of these parents are getting the job done.

* * * * *

Privatize the USPS

The Cato Institute has for some time
been advocating the privatization of the United States Postal Service. (See
"A Holiday
Gift: Post Office Going Private?" and

"Mail @ the Millennium: Will the Postal Service Go Private?".)
Each time I go to Redmond’s post office, I’m more inclined to agree.

The post office in Redmond has insufficient parking (perhaps 25 spaces),
which means that there is often a line of cars down the street waiting to
get into a parking space. Once you can park, the line often extends 20
patrons or so ahead. The first time I went to this post office, I overheard
a patron ahead of me say that they always allowed an hour’s wait whenever
they planned a visit. I could have used the time to fill out the mailing
labels that they post office requires, if there had been any in the lobby
display designed for them. Instead, I had to fill them out at the counter,
delaying my fellow patrons behind me.

I wanted to send my packages Priority Mail. I needed boxes for most of my
packages, and according to the

USPS web site, they will provide a box. Unfortunately, the site does not
tell you what sizes of boxes they can provide, or that there is a maximum
size box available. On my first arrival at the counter, I was helped by an
Asian woman whose accent was sufficiently thick that I had to ask her to
repeat everything. She was reluctant to get any boxes for me at first, but I
finally persuaded her to provide the promised boxes. One item did not fit
into the largest box, so I shipped it in the box my wife had packed it in,
which I hope will be sufficient protection to get the package to its
destination.

On my second trip to the counter, the clerk didn’t know about the boxes
in the size the first clerk had given me, and was going to have me buy boxes
from him until I pushed him enough that he asked one of his co-workers. As
it turned out, one of my gifts was too large to fit this box, and I did have
to buy a larger one.

My beef here is that I spent a long time (my visit took about 90 minutes)
getting poor delivery of services promised by a semi-governmental agency
which is subsidized by my tax dollars. (USPS expects to post billions in
debts in 2001-2, and is asking for a bailout from Congress. This in addition
to the effective subsidy of not having to pay federal, state, or local
taxes.) Like so many other governmental functions, I suspect that the price
would be lower and the service better if the post office were privatized.

I love baseball. I love it on television or in person. I love to keep
score, and I love to just watch. Every day, I check in with ESPN’s Baseball
page and the Baseball Prospectus, even during the long, hard winter. I’ll
start counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report to spring
training camps. I watch every trade rumor for my favorite team. One year I
tracked the pitch counts of all the starters and relievers, just so I could
know who’d be available to pitch each night. I dream of taking a year off so
I can follow a team through every game.

But every winter, Major League Baseball (MLB) seems to take another stab at
my love of the game. Some years, it’s the threat of a new labor dispute
disrupting the season. In other years, it’s a complaint about not getting a
new publicly-funded stadium built in one city or another. This year, we get
both, wrapped up in a more vicious package.

Just as the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the team owners and
players expired, Commissioner Bud Selig announced the owners’ plan to
eliminate two as-yet-unnamed franchises.
If it happens, it will be the first contraction in Major League Baseball in
over a century. Selig claims the owners need to
eliminate two (or more) teams because the 30 teams collectively lost a
half-billion dollars this year. The two leading contenders for contraction
are the Montreal Expos and the Minnesota Twins, though there has been some
mention of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Oakland Athletics, and Florida Marlins.

What do these teams have in common? With the lone exception of the Tampa
Bay Devil Rays, all of these teams have unsuccessfully tried to get their
local governments to buy them a new stadium. Selig has explicitly mentioned
this as a reason the Twins may be contracted. On Nov.
15, he said, "But at some point in the past decade, despite 26 or so stadium
proposals, there were chances to do something, and nothing got done. So
there are a lot of people up there who have to look themselves in the
mirror… To survive in this environment, even if you change other things,
you still need a new stadium." Of course, none of the 26 proposals read,
"The Twins will pay 100% of the costs of construction, land acquisition,
etc. for a new stadium."

This is despite the fact that the Twins led the American League in
attendance as recently as 1988, with over three million fans attending games
that year.  They were fifth in the league in 1992, the last time they
were in the top half of attendance. That was also the last year they posted
a winning record until this season. In the intervening eight years, they
reached 70 wins only three times, and 75 wins only once. In short, they put
a crummy product on the field. No wonder people stayed away.

And, according to reports, the Twins have been profitable over the past
two or three seasons. Presumably, owner Carl Pohlad tucked away the money
received through the league’s "luxury tax" program, and spent only a
relatively small amount on player salaries.

Even if you concede that the Twins need a new stadium, this demand that
the public pay for one is best described as extortion, which my dictionary
defines as "the act of obtaining something by coercion or intimidation, of
wresting something from an unwilling person by physical force, menace,
duress, torture, or any undue or illegal exercise of power or ingenuity."

* * * * *

I hate MLB. (The NFL, NBA, and NHL
are just as bad.) Since 1991, various local and state governments have spent
a whopping $2.5 billion building or renovating fourteen baseball stadiums.

Remember that all tax revenue is the result of holding a gun to somebody’s head.
Therefore, every time the government spends money on anything, you have to ask
yourself, "Would I kill my kindly, gray-haired mother for this?"

- from “Parliament of Whores,” by P. J. O’Rourke,
1991

We have put that gun to our
mothers’ heads for… baseball stadiums?

Here in Seattle, Safeco Field was budgeted at $417 million. State and
local government contributions totaled $342 million. The team’s ownership
committed to $75 million, plus all cost overruns. When the overruns reached
$100 million, the team tried to get additional public money. (Thankfully,
the Public Facilities District has declined.)

Aside
from being a better facility for the Mariners (which it is, by far), Safeco
Field is in no
other way superior to the Kingdome it replaced. In fact, it is less useful
than the Kingdome, which also hosted football games, tractor pulls, monster
truck contests, concerts, car and boat shows, etc., none of which can be
held at Safeco Field. Most of the facilities built in other cities are also
baseball-only stadiums. This truly is a transfer of hundreds of millions of
dollars from the people of Washington state and King County to the ownership
of the Mariners.

The legitimate function of government is to hold a monopoly on the use of
force, not to redistribute wealth. This applies regardless of whether the
redistribution is to corporations or individuals. If MLB teams cannot survive without this most despicable form of
corporate welfare, let ‘em close down.