In the tradition of the original Mayor Daley, the Chicago Postal Service has provided jobs for political reasons. Franzen suggests that political pork is bad business because many workers don't have the right skills or attitude for the job. 'Maximal wealth and cutting-edge technology exist side by side with a second- or third-generation urban underclass for which employment at the post office may seem less a responsibility than an extension of its federally funded entitlements,' he writes.

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The Postal Service is a dinosaur that will never be able to compete with the new information technologies on its own.

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Likewise, Franzen sees the commitment to serving the urban poor -- and by extension anyone who is poor-- as a naive managerial principle. 'With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way,' he writes. That obligation stops the Postal Service from closing a branch office just because it's losing money. Franzen concludes that the Postal Service is a dinosaur that will never be able to compete with the new information technologies on its own.

But Runyon, the first postmaster to publicly support privatization, believes the agency that started delivering mail by horse can come of age. A former Nissan executive who stopped the United Auto Workers from organizing a plant in Tennessee, Runyon is restructuring the Postal Service to operate more like a business. He's currently asking Congress to give him greater leverage in contract negotiations with postal unions.

Runyon joins a growing group of leaders who think that business, free of the rigid demands of government bureaucracy, can provide services more efficiently. 'While [privatization] does not exactly mean running government like a business, it does involve introducing corporate concepts to public service,' Camille Colatosti writes in The Progressive (June 1993). Management guru Peter Drucker puts the matter a little more bluntly. 'Government-owned enterprises stop performing as soon as political or social values interfere with the single-minded pursuit of profit,' he writes in his book The New Realities (Harper & Row, 1989).