The Moral Myopia of Magazines

...Clearly, some different rationale is required in this case...

...Seventy-two per cent have sophisticated sound systems...

...These Saturday Review readers,” an ad for Saturday Review in Advertising Age (June 30, 1975) informs us, “are a cultured, affluent group, enjoying the finer things in life (for example, 30.6 per cent of SR’s subscriber audience flew abroad in the past twelve months) along with Saturday Review .” The Jdy 14 edition of Advertising Age quotes those MPA lawyers saying that cost increases of up to $3.95 per subscriber would be “simply beyond the ability of the industry to bear...

...It was universally reported, for example, that under Wenner’s ruling the public would end up paying more in higher rates for other postal services than it would save through the reduction in first-class postage...

...This disparity in service suggests a potential solution for the moral dilemma of the second-class user...

...The Wall Street Journal, the only major newspaper distributed to subscribers through the mails, had two long articles quoting sundry authorities about how the first-class saving would be outweighed by increased costs for parcel post (according to the Reader’s Digest Association), magazine subscription costs (the MPA), and, finally, taxes (the Postal Service itself...

...All the parties with a major stake in mail service know that it is collapsing...

...But then why wasn’t he lobbying for demonopolization rather than for an increased subsidy...

...I suppose there’s some sort of multiplier effect...

...Many magazines, including this one, have to spend more on third-class solicitations than they do on secondclass mailing of the magazine itself...

...Senator Goldwater expressed it from his own point of view in an attack on Judge Wenner (“a lone administrative judge”) in the Congressional Record of June 12...

...Others support it, frequently and eloquently...

...250 per cent...

...By comparison, the annual subsidy to The Washington Monthly (to pick an arbitrary example), computed on the basis of the MPA’s own 91 cents per reader, is less than $25,000...

...NO big deal, really, just a few dollars a year per person-a bit more if Mr...

...Congress must take back the power to review rates," says a "Time Essay...

...It is an extreme example of what conservative publications usually like to point out as true of most government subsidies: the connection between the end and means is erratic at best and at worst, nonexistent...

...For secondclass rates, these magazines get treated like first-class mail...

...This effect says nothing at all about the merits of the subsidy...

...It should not be necessary for a liberal to explain to a conservative that what is at stake is not the opportunity for people to read magazines, but their willingness to exercise that opportunity by “casting their dollar ballots,” as they say in Economics I. If they are not willing to pay for the privilege, why should the government subsidize them...

...This applies primarily to Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated...

...I put it to Professor Schlesinger that all this didn’t really explain why people who don’t read magazines should help pay for the reading habits of those who do...

...And the lobbyists had come to observe...

...Storrow and I batted this idea around for a bit, but he began to get exasperated...

...Thus the rate structure punishes magazines dealing with political issues by charging them more...

...We like that word payment...

...We usually think of a subsidy as a bad thing...

...The more you think about it, the less this subsidy appears as an institution vital to the functioning of democracy and the more it begins to look like a little freebie, a little self-indulgence, awarded to themselves for good behavior by the more thoughtful elements of the middle and upper classes...

...Human Events, the extreme libertarian weekly published out of Washington, generally shares Rusher’s contempt, but it has not shared his abstinence from supplication on the Hill...

...Without the subsidy, we are told by Time, “major voices in America’s free press are threatened with extinction...

...If you assume, as Wenner did, that there would be little effect on the volume of mail in each class, obviously on average the public would be paying exactly the same...

...Any time the public is deprived of a broad range of sources of culture and information that it is now getting, we cannot know what drastic changes in society may be set in motion...

...Trouble is, the specific argument that needs to be made, if the subsidy is to be rigorously defended, is that it’s good for people in general to have other people well-informed-so good for them that they ought to pay for the privilege in case the others, probably wealthier and better informed to begin with, are unwilling to pay for it themselves...

...Indeed there is a remarkable unanimity across the political spectrum, from Kennedy to Goldwater, and from The Nation and The New Republic through Time and Reader’s Digest to Human Events, about the sanctity of cheap postal rates for magazines...

...The Wall Street Journal reported that it comes about because, “Publishers generally spend $2 in promotional expenses for every $1 in additional revenue...

...Heavy mail-order catalogues, junk mail of all sorts, books and records sent by mail, all benefit from the overcharging of the first-class stamp...

...In other words, back to the old vague generalities and scare tactics...

...This may explain the absence of a rigorous defense...

...TWM: “A lot of vague ideas have been around for a long time...

...The type of subsidy the Senator has been opposing is a government payment to bail out industries from problems of their own making...

...and the Reader‘s Digest Associationwas not representing their interests adequately...

...Storrow made the familiar reference to history...

...Means and Ends Furthermore, even accepting that the flow of information and ideas needs and deserves to be subsidized by the government, one must deal with the utter irrationality of underpriced postal rates for magazines and newspapaers as a way of doing it...

...He owns his own home, two cars, and produces a median family income over $23,000 a year...

...The Washington Monthly: "Sorry, dId I say subsidy...

...Even within the regular secondclass rate, there is discrimination in favor of the large commercial publications and against the smaller ones in terms of the quality of service provided...

...It’s tied to the historic public-service role of the post office...

...What will happen to magazines like Saturday Review that now go primarily through the mails is that they either go out of business or they try to compete on the newsstands, where the dominant motif is pornography...

...Said he, ‘The only farmers who will be able to subscribe will be the quite well-off ones.’” AI1 of this was documented by the flinging about of hysterical percentages...

...It is interesting, as well, to translate these percentages into real money...

...I have studied the figures submitted to the Postal Rate commission in support of this claim, and the magazine lobby’s position seems to be this: since two-thirds of the money brought in by subscriptions goes to pay various expenses for servicing those subscriptions, magazines wi 11 have to raise three times as much money to cover postal increases as the increases will actually cost...

...The Postal Reorganization Act instructed the Postal Service (or at least this is how the Postal Rate Commission has interpreted it-magazine publishers and others disagree) to arrange that each class of mail, along with the Postal Service as a whole, ultimately pay its own way...

...It sounds awfully elitist...

...The unions protected by their no-layoff clauses and the magazines by their subsidy have no more incentive to deal with postal inefficiency than congressmen with cost-of-living escalators have to solve the problem of inflation...

...That word also got me in trouble with James J. Storrow, publisher of The Nation, a left-wing weekly...

...Yet we live in fear that a $3 increase in subscription price will drive sufficient numbers of them away to drive us out of business...

...Yet it is also regarded as a subsidy which requires no justification, or for which the justification is obvious...

...Abundantly...

...A scruffy group we are,” he wrote coyly to one potential heavy advertiser, “but certainly there is high reader involvement , high e du ca ti oh and income and so on, the things advertisers should consider important...

...Your determined use of the word ‘subsidy’ in connection with the postal service should, I suppose, be amusing, but really it is not,” he wrote me in following up on a telephone conversation...

...The Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, as he is invariably known in postal circles, made this point at somewhat greater length in a statement to the Postal Rate Commission, filed on behalf of the Magazine Publishers Association and frequently cited by postal cognoscenti when the magazines’ right to a taxpayer subsidy is challenged...

...I just finished telling you that the Postal Service is a service...

...In the Washington area, for example, Postal Service trucks drive out to the Journal’s plant in suburban Maryland to pick up the copies early in the morning...

...There is simply a class interest shared by politicians and magazine readers, which no one who does not benefit from it is in a position to challenge...

...By the MPA‘s own estimates, the annual cost of Wenner’s proposed rate increases to an average weekly would be $3.95 per subscriber, that to an average monthly only 91 cents...

...122 per cent more if Wenner has his way...

...But their behavior is essentially the same as that of the unions...

...For 200 years freedom of information has been a top priority in our political and social order,” he writes...

...I have tried to understand how this is possible...

...Readers would have to be “not simply loyal, but rich...

...First-class postage would be reduced from 10 cents to 8% cents, but the saving for the great majority of people would be more than outweighed by higher costs for everything else,” wrote Time...

...The Postal Service, according to Wenner, had made only the most primitive attempts to apportion its costs between various classes of mail...

...The Wall Street Journal for the very same price, gets the best service of all...

...I’m not going to plead for any special treatment from a government for which I have contempt...

...Allowing the Postal Service to take advantage of “down time”-when its labor force and equipment aren’t needed for first-class mail-might result in a second-class rate not very different from the one currently being charged...

...Presumably this free flow occurs equally in any number of ways-in magazines sold on newsstands, newspapers delivered by paperboys, books sold in stores, mimeographed leaflets distributed on street corners, etc...

...History Speakinn One searches in vain, through the thickets of congressional testimony, up the files of the Postal Rate Commission, through the media swamps themselves, for a coherent defense of the government subsidy to magazines and newspapers sent through the mails...

...I was a close friend of the head of the committee, Bob Myers, and it was important to him to show unanimity among the small magazines of all political beliefs...

...Almost the entire benefit of the subsidy goes not to political magazines which may need it to survive, but to prosperous magazines, usually apolitical, published primarily for the benefit of advertisers...

...Nearly half of our readers took at least two vacations last year...

...But Wenner’s decision “touched off alarm bells throughout the world of print journalism,” in the words of T i m . It certainly touched something-or-other at Time, Inc., which, in an article entitled “Postal Nightmare,” burst into a remarkable display of feverish special pleading...

...Maybe it would...

...Certain magazines, with “nonprofit” status, are even more heavily subsidized than secalled “regular rate” publications...

...they were more dependent on reader subscriptions, more likely to go out of business...

...The Wenner ruling is disguised as a break for the consumer,” Robert Myers wrote in The New Republic, but, “Any household mailing a few parcel post packages of five pounds would lose more than it saves on letters...

...five times what they were...

...In fact, 47 per cent of our readers feel a product advertised in our magazine would be more reliable than a similar product not advertised there...

...Michael Kinsley is managing editor for this issue of The Washington Monthly...

...From this base of fantasy, the publishers’ wider tale of woe took flight...

...The phrase “non-profit” is itself a decep tive legalism (a “term of art,” as they teach law students to call them...

...When I asked Norman Cousins how he would justify the subsidy to a person who does not read magazines, he said, “I don’t want to persuade him...

...The proper word is ‘service.’ ” On the telephone, Mr...

...He goes on to speculate, “One must hope that these actions [rate increases] are wholly unrelated to the warfare against the media of opinion in recent years...

...Instead of confronting directly the issue of the subsidy and the rationale for it, newspapers and magazines covered Wenner’s ruling with distortions about its meaning, and lies about its potential impact on publica tion s and individual citizens...

...And from Mr...

...Common sense, in fact, suggests exactly the opposite...

...Yet the organs we turn to for clarity on such public issues-which want to be paid by the government for providing it-have every incentive not to supply it...

...This is all untrue...

...They sort them and have them delivered the same morning as far away as Richmond, Virginia...

...One of Bob Myers’ schemes for his Committee for the Diversity of the Press, besides his efforts to get special postal treatment for these magazines, was an attempt to sell them as a unit to advertisers...

...Bob Kephart was publisher of Human Events at the time it was active in this committee...

...There is no question that higher magazine prices will lead to lower volume, which in turn may lead to even higher prices (even if a sobering up of the magazines’ dizzy figures results in a slower climb...

...But the self-congratulatory air with which it is accepted-not to mention the deceit and double talk with which it is defended-is unattractive...

...But a rational evaluation cannot take place if people refuse to see a subsidy for what it is, just because it’s one they’re in favor of...

...Certainly The Washington Monthly does not...

...This is a payment...

...Myers refused The Wmhington Monthly an interview to discuss this question, saying that he was too busy promoting his book to talk about it...

...This issue also contains an ad for Time Inc.’s Money: “They have plenty, too...

...It should be made available to the public at a price the public is willing to pay...

...The small political magazines which are truly non-profit, squatting on the knife-edge of bankruptcy, do not qualify for the non-profit rate...

...These numbers surfaced in almost every article printed on the subject of Wenner’s decision...

...Now that rates are set by an independent commission, with a mandate to see that each class of mail pays its own costs, the subsidy cannot be maintained without being made explicit...

...A subsidy to the paper industry would benefit all forms of written communication equally...

...It also would authorize a permanent annual subsidy to the Postal Service of $35 per mailbox...

...And 88 per cent let a machine do the washing...

...National Geographic’s circulation is over eight million copies a month...

...The difference is that there is discussion...

...Driven to Poriiography Another mystification that enjoyed wide repetition concerned the effect of Judge Wenner’s decision on magazine subscription prices...

...By Wenner’s calculations, almost two cents of every 1 @cent first-class stamp was going to subsidize other classes of mail, primarily second-class magazines and newspapers...

...was because [sic] they perceived a powerful public interest in the promotion of newspapers and magazines...

...The magazine publishers were represented, along with the greeting card manufacturers, the mail-order catalogue firms, and others vitally interested in the topic of the day: postal rates...

...Only if your concept of the mails is as not being a public service...

...All of this is not to suggest that a price rise of $3.95-or even $11.85 or whatever other fantasy figure the MPA might produce-wouldn’t cripple many magazines, or even put them out of business...

...Magazines had borne the previous rate increases with a sort of simpering stoicism...

...That’s a tough problem...

...The Washington Monthly used to send potential advertisers a readership survey alleging that 35.3 per cent of its subscribers made international airplane trips in the previous year, that 42 per cent read six or more books during the previous three months, plus the usual broad claims about consumption of alcoholic beverages...

...Time said that its price-along with that of Newsweek, Saturday Review, The New Yorker, etc.-“could double and possibly triple...

...If the purpose of maintaining cheap postal rates for magazines and newspapers is to maximize distribution of facts about and serious discussion of important public issues, advocates of the subsidy will not wish to use the press coverage of Judge Wenner’s decision as an example in their favor...

...The Washington Monthly has long believed that the task of achieving major reform is made more difficult because people are unwilling to examine critically their own little free rides...

...It is like saying that supermarkets, on a one-percent profit margin, should raise prices a dollar for every penny increase in their costs...

...Rather than asking for a specific appropriation to cover a second-class mail deficit, and defending the subsidy explicitly, they are urging Congress to take back general rate-setting duties...

...And the MPA would have this fear enshrined as a great principle, to be raised whenever anyone tries to take away our subsidy...

...I want to persuade you...

...Thus it was that they joined the other postal supplicants in returning to the Hill...

...Wenner’s decision was “a nightmarish leap forward,” the price of Time “could double and possibly triple,” everyone on both sides of the readjustment would lose great amounts of money, “smaller publications would die by the hundreds,” and even at Time, Inc., Wenner’s decision would have “some inevitable effects on editorial quality...

...We don’t view it as a subsidy,” says Terry Emerson, Goldwater’s legislative assistant...

...As to the effect of higher postal rates on editorial content of those few magazines which succeed in struggling along under the burden of their own costs, the magazine industry is of two minds...

...But the MPA claimed, with poignant exactitude, that to cover these costs would require annual subcription price increases of $1 1.85 per weekly and $2.73 per monthly, even without any decline in volume...

...Of course, it’s hardly worth challenging...

...I asked him how he reconciled these efforts with his magazine’s libertarian principles...

...The Geographic advised advertisers that its non-profit status was a valuable marketing tool: “National Geographic readers value the honesty and integrity they see in our pages...

...The MPA warned in its brief to the Postal Rate Commission that if Wenner’s rates were allowed to go through, “some publishers will deliberately change content from that appealing to a large audience to content tailored to high-income, spe cial-in teres t subscribers...

...You like that word subsidy,” Emerson elaborated...

...And even if you believe it, there’s an underlying hypocrisy involved-a disheartening indication of how fragile this alleged dedication to the free flow of ideas is, even among those most deeply in the swim...

...The most familiar liberal justification for interference with the market system is that it cannot be expected to work properly when the basic distribution of wealth is so skewed...

...Its origins stretch back to almost the birth of our nation...

...The beauty of a subsidy to people who read magazines is that those who need to be persuaded of its value generally are those who benefit from it...

...We thought we should take a look at the magazine subsidy before proceeding on our perceived mission of attacking other people’s cozy arrangements...

...And when they come home they like to be comfortable...

...Myers, publisher of The New Republic, was the founder and guiding light of the Committee for the Diversity of the Press, which was essentially his desk-drawer operation...

...This is indeed his task, and an easy one most likely...

...The Senator’s involvement in this issue stems from his great respect for the meaning and impact of the written word...

...To ask the Postal Service to do so is very wrong-headed...

...Sometimes it is a good thing and sometimes it is not...

...Publications coming out at intervals of a week or less may apply to the Postal Service for so-called “red-tag’’ or “time-value” service...

...The magazine lobbyists and others told their story in July to the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee, which reported out a bill simply overriding Judge Wenner's decision and the elaborate regulatory rituals leading up to it...

...As for wine,” an earlier ad said, “70 per cent stock it in their homes, 75 per cent keep a selection of liquor on hand, and 60 per cent entertained ten or more times last year...

...Of course this is nonsense...

...We think this is a payment for a proper public service...

...Ha book on commercial satellite communication, Outer Space and Inner Sanctums, will be published in December by John Wiley...

...The dilemma gets more uncomfortable the more you poke at it...

...In the longer run, the magazines want to bring back the old days permanently...

...A couple of goodwill gestures to the postal unions (performed from the rear) have also been expensive...

...We just went in front of a congressional commi ttee and told them our story...

...But nowhere does he even attempt to explain why the audience for these magazines deserves to be rescued from these dangers by the government...

...This does not mean, of course, that their subscribers are poor (although this is a common fallacy...

...Nor, it develops (whatever they may have thought they were doing in 1970), do most legislators...

...On another occasion Goldwater said, “What is at stake is an opportunity for the American reading public to enjoy the widest possible circulation of news, information, and opinions in the mails, a privilege which has been part of the fundamental heritage of our citizens since the founding of the Nation...

...In this way the magazines and newspapers may get the help they need, so as to continue to supply the politicians that "public fully informed on current issues" which they say they want, without having to use that word "subsidy" at all...

...Many of the same problems arise, and are debated, in attempts to justify government subsidy of the arts...

...First-class postage rates have gone from 6 cents to 10 cents since the Postal Service took over, and are headed to 13 cents, because the legendary efficiency of capitalism failed to assert itself the instant the word “corporation” was attached to the postal monopoly and the Postmaster General was given a fat salary in an attempt to delude him into thinking he was running a private company...

...In order to fulfill what it saw as its obligation under the law, the Postal Service has almost dou‘bled second-class rates since 1971, and plans a further increase of 38 per cent in “phases” extending through 1979, at which point second-class mail supposedly would be self-supporting...

...Myers and his committee emphasized the difference between their membership and that of the MPA: They had smaller circulation, less money, fewer ads...

...The organization lobbied along with the MPA for relief from second-class rate increases and also worked briefly in 1973 with Representative Morris Udal1 on a bill which would have restructured the rates so as to give more help to magazines of smaller circulation...

...Emerson: "Maybe subsidy isn't a bad word for you...

...As if to prove this latter point, a “Time Essay,” entitled “Why the Postal Service Must Be Changed” and written in the same varicose vein, followed shortly...

...Wenner’s proposed rate structure-whatever its merits or defects-was not designed to raise additional money for the Postal Service...

...Emerson: "Right...

...The more information gets around, the more it goes beyond the original readers of the magazines...

...The congressional position is similarly concise...

...William Rusher, publisher, said, “We have not requested any subsidy because we do not believe it is sound practice for the government to go around subsidizing things, including us...

...Professor Schlesinger also writes, “There is no great value in speculation about motives...

...TWM: "Payment for a public service...

...But isn’t this just the free enterprise system at work...

...Not having to pay its own way saves the Geographic, at an absolute minimum, $10 million a year...

...Myers in The New Republic ("Mail Muddle"), "Allowing rates to be set by experts, whose conception of the public interest is an idiosyncratic matter, has been an unforeseen and high price to pay for the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act in terms of the diversity of printed publications available to the public, and quality mail service...

...He said, “The diffusion of information benefits everybody...

...Informed discourse on public issues is what the magazines claim to provide as the public benefit they exchange for the postal subsidy...

...On the other hand, Norman Cousins suggested in another MPAsponsored brief, and repeated in a telephone conversation, that everhigher postal rates may force him to broaden, rather than narrow, lis appeal-in a way he considers unhealthy...

...This scattershot effect (as conservatives will tell you when the subject happens not to be magazines) is the inevitable result of any indirect subsidy which has not been justified with clarity and applied with some finesse...

...All this enthusiasm is for a subsidy of several hundred million dollars a year which not only, like most government subsidies, distorts the free-market system in a way usually objectionable to conservatives, but has the unliberal effect of transferring money, on the average, from poorer people to more affluent ones...

...Yet the subsidy goes only to publications sent through the mails...

...etc...

...The reason it makes no sense to charge people for the benefit they gain from the Army is that national defense is what economists call a “public good”- it cannot be provided to anyone in particular without providing it to all...

...It’s a public service to the reading public...

...Affluent, Active and Acquisitive While Norman Cousins is laboring in the file drawers of the Postal Rate Commission, manning the flood walls against rising tides of pornography and red ink, his readers are living the life of Riley...

...Sounds to me as if you’ve been talking to Bill Buckley...

...The publisher of Progressive Farmer was quoted (in Time, The New York Times, and elsewhere) as reporting that as a result of Wenner’s decision, “subscriptions would doubtless have to jump from $7 to $25...

...And how is that different from a subsidy...

...But an administrative judge at the Rate Commission, Seymour Wenner, suprised everyone by rejecting the IO-cent rate...

...Any passing thought that the current postal subsidy may selectively benefit ideas and information more directly relevant to the political process is an utter delusion...

...The reason...

...This was some thing supported by George Washington...

...Only 27 per cent felt that way about news magazines...

...Some took as many as four...

...The very word “subsidy” is considered off-limits, which makes rational debate difficult...

...The median household income of subscribers is $24,340...

...The general notion that magazines and newspapers sent through the mails perform a public service beyond the service they perform to their readers is not all that far-fetched...

...The subsidy proposal is opposed by the White House, and the future of the bill is uncertain...

...The Washington Monthly : “That’s sort of a vague notion, isn’t it...

...Not coincidentally, it is these magazines which are most active in lobbying for the subsidy (invoking of course, not their own interests but those of “thousands of smaller and more specialized publications,” as The Washington Posr, owner of Newsweek, put it in a recent editorial...

...Congress simply set rates wherever it liked and made up whatever deficit resulted...

...Magazines are quite vulnerable as it is...

...This is pretty stark compared to a general invocation of the free flow of ideas and the noble course of history...

...The Postal Service is a necessary service of government...

...In order to qualify for the lower non-profit rate, a publication must be non-political...

...While the subsidy helps the travel industry advertisers in National Geographic and the drug companies who purchase space in the Journal of the American Medical Association get their messages across to affluent readers on the cheap, these magazines avoid turning a profit by equipping palatial editorial chambers, paying generous salaries and travel allowances, throwing elaborate luncheons, etc...

...But can you imagine such a subsidy getting similar unanimous support...

...The founding fathers favored cheap mailing of newspapers and magazines...

...And, “TO condemn magazines to a lingering death would be...

...They enjoy a second-class magazine delivery rate approximately two-thirds that of other magazines, and a third-class bulk rate for subscriber solicitations that is less than half the normal charge...

...This is the basic argument...

...It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time...

...The Albert Schweitzer Professor: “It’s not a vague notion...

...Myers gets his way, a bit less if Judge Wenner triumpks...

...If you assume, as the magazines insisted, that there would be dramatic decreases in volume in the previously subsidized classes, then the average postal consumer would be paying less and not more...

...But if people who read magazines were as convinced of their importance as people who don’t read them are asked to be, they would not be scared away by piddling increases of a couple dollars a year, and the subsidy would not be necessary...

...On several occasions of testimony before Congress, and in his new book, entitled The Coming Collapse of the Post Office, Myers discusses at length the danger to small magazines of asking them to pay their own way through the mails...

...The bill would give the Postal Service permission to raise first-class rates rather than lower them, and to continue its more modest scale of second-class increases...

...Most of these huge numbers, of course, were reporting overlapping chunks of the same general increase, which made it look much larger...

...A “subsidy” occurs when there are some taxpayers who do not benefit from the service directly, but who nevertheless are helping to pay for it...

...Seventy-four per cent own color TVs...

...We don’t expect the Army to pay for itself, or the highways...

...This is because any subsidy that takes place is explicit and· direct, and because the beneficiaries of the subsidy don't have a monopoly on the channels of public discussion...

...The best-known of the non-profits is National Geographic, which said of its readers in Advertising Age of June 9, “They have money and they spend it...

...Back to The Hill Before 1970, when Congress used to set postal rates, no public discussion of the postal subsidy to magazines and newspapers was necessary, because there was little consciousness that it was a subsidy...

...We're living in a regulated environment," said Chapin Carpenter, Jr., head lobbyist of the MPA...

...Thus Time is delivered within a day of publication whereas The Washington Monthly, for the same price, takes up to a week...

...It used to be different...

...He proposed that the first-class stamp be priced at 8.5 cents and that second-class rates be raised not 38 per cent but 122 per cent by 1979...

...Obviously, a well-informed citizenry and active debate on public issues add to the effectiveness of democracy...

...But degenerative events had taken their course, so the House Post Office Committee was debating this summer whether to increase the annual subsidy and/or cut in on the Postal Rate Commission’s dance macabre with the price of postage...

...But this makes it difficult to explain to people who don’t read magazines, or fly abroad, or own sophisticated sound systems, what exactly is at stake that is so precious that they should be required to help pay for it...

...Hard-core libertarians oppose it, for all the obvious reasons...

...Time reported postal rate increases of 175 per cent since 1971...

...Second-class rates, for magazines and newspapers, have gone up for these reasons, but also for another...

...Senator Gaylord Nelson has said that the policy of cheap second-class rates “is premised on the notion that a public fully informed on current issues is essential to the vitality of our democratic self-government...

...All citizens enjoy its protection equally, so it makes sense to pay for it out of general tax revenues...

...When is a Subsidy not a Subsidy...

...Lawyers for companies seeking go,vernmen t largesse often invent statistical tricks like these to fim-flam the federal agencies they deal with...

...It simply indicates that, by and large, if subscribers cancel rather than pay the higher rates, it’s because they don’t want to, not because they can’t afford to...

...Human Events was active in a short-lived organization called the Committee for the Diversity of the Press, composed of smaller, financially modest, mostly political magazines (including The Washington Monthly), which felt that the Magazine Pub Lishers Association-the official magazine lobby, dominated by Time, Inc...

...I meant payment...

...Second-class rates traditionally have been kept very low, with the difference between income and costs being made up by a combination of higher first-class rates and Post .Office deficits financed by Congress...

...The way I rationalize it is that if this entire postal structure was demonopolized and opened up to competition, we would be paying no more than the subsidized rate we currently pay...

...Yet they concentrate their efforts on protecting their own little piece of the action...

...This would be after a phasing-in period scheduled to last until 1979...

...But they rarely have such a wide opportunity to flim-flam the public as well...

...It was designed to reduce the amount of money generated by first-class mail by a certain amount, $900 million, and increase that brought in from the other classes by an equal amount, in order to reflect the true costs incurred by the Postal Service for each class...

...It’s not vague to me...

...The most egregious example of how grotesquely inefficient the current postal rate structure is as a way to stimulate political discourse is the case of the so-called non-profits...

...Of another non-profit, we learn, “The Smithsonian reader is affluent, active and acquisitive...

...TASP: “Well, it may be vague to you...

...It’s something that’s been around throughout our history,” explains Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., by telephone from New York...

...Not even William Buckley, I’m sure, believes he is ,merely selling a product, putting his goods on the market for the benefit only of the immediate consumer with no external benefit to society as a whole...

...And it is paid for not only out of general tax revenues, but also by an invisible tax on first-class mail users-who themselves are engaging in the free flow of information and ideas...

...But this is merely the reverse side of the same coin: if subsidization leads to wider circulation, eliminating the subsidy leads to smaller circulation...

...The large magazines, filled with advertising, which run the magazine lobby, are fond of pointing out that many magazines are poor and dependent upon their subscribers...

...They expect the same of the advertising they find there...

...Volume would decline, prices would soar out of readers’ reach, magazines would be forced out of business, editorial quality would suffer...

...The principle that magazines and newspapers should pay their own way through the mails is not one to which most magazines and newspapers subscribe...

...The Postal Service was waiting this summer for its two-year-old price of ten cents for a first-class letter to be declared “permanent” by the Postal Rate Commission, so that it could then move for a “temporary” increase to 13 cents...

...And of course it’s not just magazines that enjoy this subsidy...

...It’s clear that the continuing subsidy is not the result of any conspiracy between politicians and the press, or completely the result of heavy lobbying by the magazine publishers...

...If anything, the rates and services are structured to produce exactly the opposite result...

...33 per cent more 100 days later...

...This would be useful, because it's a word which, used too often, makes Terry Emerson of Senator Goldwater's office burst out laughing...

...Yet on the issue of the subsidy itself, there is no informed discourse going on at all...

...Among liberal publications quick to expose favors to the privileged, and conservative ones normally shrill in their denunciation of government waste and hand-outs, there is an apparent unanimity in the feeling that the justice of this arrangement is too evident to require elaboration...

...But even magazine publishers are aware that there are occasions when fine words butter no parsnips...

...The magazines complain bitterly about being at the mercy of an inefficient post office bureaucracy and especially about the extravagant union settlements...

...The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, which established the Postal Service as a semi-independent corporation and the Postal Rate Commission to regulate its prices, was supposed to eliminate the traditional deficits and relieve Congress of the duty to set postal rates...

...Buckley’s National Review is, in fact, the only publication of note to have refused participation in the lobbying effort for cheaper postal rates...

...to weaken the foundations of the republic...