I’m at a low point on my emotional/energetic cycle, and on top of that my laptop caught some battery issues and keeps restarting during startup, leaving me with this iffy reblog-as-link mobile app.

Soooo, not much posting lately. I’ve got ideas kicking around for two American history effortposts though, drop a note if there’s one you’d like me to prioritize.

They are:

1) “Holy Shit You Guys The Post Office Was Important”

(When people say the federal government used to be just the post office and the military that’s close enough to true, but it’s one of those “all you have is a hammer” situations - the Post Office was why we have vertically integrated political parties [on several accounts], it was key to creating a coherent American literature and culture, it was the first domestic spy agency, it was long a battlefield of cultural subversion and countersubversion, it was how the government first started to establish control over railroads, with Rural Free Delivery and parcel post, Sears & Roebuck became the Amazon of its day. Actually, a better title might be “The Post Office: the Internet of its Day.”)

2) “Okay Seriously Who *Did* Build Roads When The State Didn’t?”

(Local roads developed organically [under government-enforced common law] but were inevitably placed under government control when maintenance ran into free-rider issues. Medium distance point-to-point roads could be built privately [though often with use of eminent domain or other state support] but the owners often actively resisted connecting them to any useful network, and in any case they tended to degrade for lack of maintenance and fall into state hands. [Even with tolls such roads usually lost money on operations, their profitability coming by way of increasing the value their builders’ newly accessible landholdings.] Long-distance roads have always been state projects, but that’s kinda minor since roads as a method of long-distance travel and transport are actually a pretty recent innovation in America.)

Eh? Eh?