David Tufte asks:
Did voluntaryXchange change the world? Read on. The U.S. Postal Service has approved the sale of a stamp with no monetary face value, but rather real one.
The ‘forever’ stamp is used to purchase a real service: one stamp
will always get one letter through. Always. Kind of like a but ticket
…
This is in contrast to the current situation where stamps are sold
with a fixed nominal value, and the nominal price of sending a letter
changes through time. This is why you need those special rate markup
stamps to use with your old stamps every time they change their rate.
I don’t really know whether this idea started with me or not. What I
do know is that at the time I suggested this in a post entitled "Governments Don’t Get Markets At All" almost 3 years ago, there was no mention of this concept anywhere on the internet that I could link to.
I have to say that I think that the answer there is no. I could be wrong of course, but even a bureaucracy as torpid as the US Mail might have noted the actions of the Royal Mail over this period of time:
To overcome issues around withdrawal and replacement of stamps caused
by postage rate changes, stamps inscribed for a service, such as ‘1st’,
rather than with a specific value, were introduced in 1989.
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