Ben Franklin, who has been called the first citizen of print, established lower rates for newspapers when he was postmaster general (and arranged for magazines to be shipped free of charge by post road). Franklin, who founded one of America's first real magazines, The Saturday Evening Post, was simultaneously postmaster, printer and magazine maven, so he may be said to have had a conflict of interest. But George Washington also believed in the free distribution of newspapers (in many ways the equivalent of today's journals of opinion). Indeed, most of the Founding Fathers thought the circulation of ideas, information, opinion, expertise and argument in periodical form would help the new nation discover its identity.

It was not until Richard Nixon's Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that Congress required each class of mail to cover its own cost. Until that time, the post office treated periodicals (second-class mail) as a public good. Like water, education and the national defense, they were not expected to pay their own way.

Because the US Postal Service still retains the discretion to propose the allocation of costs within each class, every time a new postal increase is recommended a bruising behind-the-scenes battle ensues, as numerous interested groups make their case before an obscure agency called the Postal Rate Commission, which receives tons of paper and eons of testimony and after many months makes recommendations to the Board of Governors (presidential appointees all) of the USPS.

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