Anyone who's ever had to deal with the law, the IRS, bill-collectors or all of the above understands that your mailbox is actually a weapon. At any time, anyone, anywhere can send you a piece of mail with some writing on it, "NOTICE: You owe us money. Lots of it. This piece of mail is proof thereof. Failure to respond within X days will result in default."
If you are a procrastinator and do not regularly check your mail or if you accidentally discard one of these pieces of mail, it will not be too much longer before you get a knock at your door and some "friendly person" will throw a hand-couriered piece of paper at you. At least, in this case, they went to the bother to actually make sure that the notice was delivered into your hands and didn't get ground to shreds in a mud puddle on the side of the road along a USPS delivery route. If it's the IRS - you may just wake up to find that you cannot access your bank account because it has been seized by the Department of "Justice", or that your paycheck is $0.00 this week because they seized that - or both.
The USPS is the device by which the predator-class throws the ball in your court. They sent you a notice. It's not their fault if you don't check your mail in a timely manner or appear at a hearing they scheduled for you. You didn't respond, so they win by default. And this is why the USPS will never go away, no matter how many billions of dollars it loses each year. It is perhaps the single most valuable weapon in their arsenal.
The electronic age is, indeed, a threat to the existence of the USPS. But that's why the Establishment wants to create "online identities" so that everything you do on the web is tied together into one big tarball. This tarball will be the digital equivalent of your place of residence with its fixed mailbox on the front. When "they" serve a notice to your digital identity and you don't respond, that will be proof that you have no interest in the matter and so they win by default.
But until this can be brought about (and I believe it is actually technologically infeasible to do this), the USPS is here to stay. It is the "ball's in your court now!" weapon by which anyone can make a legal claim to any amount of your property - they can even make property claims in excess of your net worth! - at any time.
Of course, this is upside-down-backwards world. First of all, the purpose of mail is to communicate, not to issue notices. In the old days, you could send mail collect and the recipient paid to get the piece of mail sent to him. That's because the recipient wanted to receive that communication. Who wants to receive a notice saying, "You owe me money." Nobody would pay to receive that kind of notice. Hence, such notices are not communications. They are threats.
A person sitting at home, not harming anyone, not doing anything to anybody else should by default be the sole and unchallengeable owner of his property. Sending him a piece of paper with letters on it saying "You owe me money" should be nothing more than a practical joke - or the request of a peer with a legitimate property claim who cannot resort to violence against you unless you obstruct him from retrieving his own property.
In other words, the onus should always be on the claimant to arrange arbitration and secure the presence of the respondent. If the respondent has not checked his mail - or doesn't have a mailbox at all - that is no "default". That is simply a failure of the claimant to secure the presence of the respondent at a hearing that the claimant would like to arrange. Such failure could also be the result of thep rincipled refusal of the respondent because he believes that the claimant's claims are so ludicrous as to not even deserve a response. I have a feeling that a lot of the threats issued through USPS mail these days are of precisely this nature.
They're games played by profiteering gamers who count on the fact that a certain percentage of the public are procrastinators or easily intimidated by fancy, imposing-looking mail filled with legalese and will simply buckle under the pressure and cough up the cash and accept that they have "defaulted". In complicity with the State's courts, the illogic of sending a piece of USPS mail as a "notice", is a profitable business.
Clayton -