Our hero is a Mr. Robert Goodwin of Arlington, who, according to the Herald, refused to go along with the ridiculous Security Theatre currently being randomly performed by the MBTA here in Boston. I personally once saw one of these roaming throw-back “checkpoints,” but was near enough another stop to simply turn around and leave. Alewife Station is the end of the Red Line, with no other stations nearby, giving Mr. Goodwin ample reason to be pissed and little choice. Good on you, sir, for standing up to these embiciles.

The second award today (an unprecedented step in these trying times) goes to Cambridge District Court Judge Roanne Sragow, whose superlative moral compass saw this incident for the incredible nonsensical intrusion into basic freedom it is and dismissed the charges. Golf clap for you, Your Honor. Well done.

Let me propose a solution that isn’t so modest: Dismantle the thing. Shut it down. This bloated, anachronistic, expensive Hydra has lived long enough. Don’t “reinvent” it. Don’t cook up a bunch of half-baked tangential “services” in a pathetic attempt to innovate and “grow revenue.” Don’t waste another microsecond “negotiating” with the unions. Far kinder to euthanize it and let the resources it consumes be redirected into something of value.

Here’s the plan: lay off all the carriers, drivers, sorters, counter clerks. Every employee. Every one. Sell the trucks, jeeps, cars, vans, trailers. Every one. Sell the post office buildings. All of them. Close the adminstrative offices and sell those buildings, too. All of them. Sell the furniture/fixtures/ down to the bare walls. Put the proceeds in a defined contribution system for retired and legacy employees and shove their iceberg into open water. If anything is left over (there won’t be), buy a cup of coffee for the auctioneer.

How many legitimate pieces of first class mail do you get in a year? A dozen? How many will you get next year? Are there any other ways a similar message could be delivered to you? You bet there are.

More than half the mail the USPS delivers is junk mail. This means the direct marketing association people will be unhappy. Boo hoo. How many trees do you idiots kill, ship to me, and make me carry up and then down stairs and put in my recycling bin? Why does the USPS charge them a third of the price of first class mail? That is the most ass-backwards thing I have ever heard. Look – I’m saving Planet Earth right out of the gate here. I’m nothing if not Green.

What else do I get in the mail? Magazines? Print magazines are dying. Yes, I prefer a print magazine, but if I can read it on an iPad or online in its full form, I think I can make that sacrifice. Or, you could work out dead-tree subscription delivery some other way – through the few remaining newsstands, for example: print a coupon or show some proof of subscription to the newsseller, they get credit from the publisher. Easily handled with technology for you Luddites. In any event it will be a moot point in five years or less anyway.

Who else is gonna cry wolf? Well, the nearly 600,000 Hydra employees who will be laid off. Their unions. Again, Boo Hoo. If you open up the shrinking market for first class mail delivery to FedEx, UPS, and other potential competitors, guess what? They’re gonna need Cliff Clavins to schlep all that stuff around. No, they won’t need 600,000 of them. No, it won’t be for forty-four cents anymore. But would you pay a buck to send Aunt Muriel that birthday card since she doesn’t have Gmail? Yes. Yes you would.

In the end, I think the happy folks will far outnumber the not-so-happy-you-took-my-job-for-life folks. You know who else is gonna be happy? Starbucks. This little plan will open up nearly 32,000 former Post Offices it can then fill with hipster music and comfy chairs and free wi-fi and bags of Cafe Verona so you can get that $5 latte in West Branch, Iowa and anywhere else you might accidentally find yourself undercaffeinated.

The US Postal Service, like so many other things our government undertook in the last couple centuries, is no longer a necessary service. Private companies and alternate technologies can provide the “services” the USPS currently provides, faster, cheaper, better, and in the way you want them. This is America. We deserve better.

Oh wait. Could it be because the wizards in charge DESTROYED over 600,000 of them last year in the Cash For Clunkers Scheme?

Naw. That can’t be it. Because that would mean taxpayers paid for the first scandalous waste of money to destroy things which still had value, and now are paying higher prices for the remaining vehicles.
In essence, the taxpayers are paying twice – once for the clunker, and again in the form of higher prices for used cars now. (Plus of course the deadweight loss of value inherent in the government administration of this idiotic fraud.)
Golf clap for our government. Brilliant. Well done.

Fair disclosure, I know very little about horse racing, but there are many sports I don’t care about, and that’s never stopped me from mocking them.

1) If your company offers unpaid internships, you are severely restricting your potential candidate pool. Not many, particularly now, can AFFORD to work with no pay, no matter how “valuable” the “experience” might be. I know I certainly couldn’t when I was a student. Do you really want to limit your company to only candidates that don’t actually need the job?

2) The candidate pool is unnecessarily limited in a second way: I value my time and my life too highly to work for nothing, on the basis of some stranger’s “promise” that my “experience” will be “valuable” and that therefore I should enter into some arrangement whereby my time and effort is valued at zero. I fervently hope today’s youth have at least some marginal level of self-respect and believe similarly. Do you really want to exclude candidates with a healthy level of self-respect?

Let’s be honest here. If your company has a legitimate need for junior-level employees, you can afford to pay them something, even if it’s only minimum wage or a flat stipend for the summer. If your company is doing it out of some sense of “public good” and “lending a helping hand” or “giving a leg up” to people who want to make a career in your industry, you can afford to pay them something. And if you pay them something, you will have your pick of the ENTIRE potential candidate pool, not just the ones who can afford to do it for nothing and/or the ones willing to suffer through a summer because they are not self-aware enough to value their time and effort. If your company CANNOT afford to pay them something, then I would suggest that either you have no real need for them, or your company has real issues far larger than deciding which person to hire to do filing this summer.

If you respond to this with “well, that’s how I did it,” or “we’ve never done it that way in the past,” that’s not an actual reason to continue with the practice, and if you think it is, well, I don’t want to work for a person like you or a company like yours.

I would suggest all the would-be interns out there think about why, really, they want to work in an industry or for a company that values them at zero. What does that say about you and your career choice? Life’s too short to work for nothing. Find a company willing to do the right thing, like, say, the publisher of The Atlantic. I’d work for them (now). An organization that can change its mind and do the right thing (and retroactively, too) is the kind of company I would consider worthy of my time and effort.

It seems that some not-very-public-spirited people would rather pay the (lower) monthly penalty, instead of a (much higher) monthly insurance premium, and then, get this: when they actually need it, they sign up for insurance to pay for their expensive healthcare malady. After which, get this: they drop the (expensive) coverage and go back to paying the (lower) monthly penalty. The very NERVE of these people, being LOGICAL and EFFICIENT with their money. Houston, we have a (very expensive and obvious) loophole.

It certainly is a good thing the shiny new national system isn’t based on the Massachusetts system.

My moment of hope lasted until the fourth paragraph, when we learn what this tidal wave of positive change might entail. You can read the brief, but devilishly-complicated list in the Herald. Suffice it to say, these changes are microscopic. I doubt most small business owners even know the line items exist. This is the best they can come up with here? Really? This and some nefarious and ill-conceived tax credit for hiring new employees (which you will read about years from now in the Herald when they report on the shocking amount of fraud the system generated) ?

I looked into starting a small business in Massachusetts. The fee for setting up a Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) here is $500. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. But wait, there’s more. Said LLC must then file an annual report with the Commonwealth. Guess what the filing fee is for the annual report? That’s right. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Ok, so start a Delaware LLC for $90. Nope. Don’t try that. Then you get to file a “foreign” corporation annual report. Guess what the fee for that is.

Now, I’m not saying for a venture-backed tech company that thousand bucks (not including legal fees) is gonna break the bank. But it will suck capital out of companies BEFORE they get to the venture-backable stage. That friends-and-family-and-Visa funding stage.

All this just goes to prove that very few in politics could get real jobs, or have even ever had a real job. They simply have no idea what business is about, and unless you understand what business is about, you cannot understand incentives.

Want to create jobs here in Massachusetts, home to several of the finest universities in the entire world? It’s not complicated:

1) Simplify. Stop trying to regulate Every. Single. Thing. I. Do.
2) Cut taxes to the point where MA is at least competitive; better yet, cut so that MA is a leader and people stop calling it Taxachusetts.

People and businesses respond to incentives. If the incentive says “Massachusetts will suck every last dime out of my business in taxes and fees,” and “there are so many regulators and regulations that my legal team will need to be half my staff,” then businesses and people will leave. And they have, and will continue to do so until the only people left here are the politicians and the people receiving benefits. How sad is it when one of the premier employers here moves to RHODE ISLAND? When Rhode Island becomes more attractive, time to look in the mirror and schedule that liposuction.