If you still use snail mail like I do, get ready for another U.S. Postal Service rate hike — up to 49 cents to mail a first class letter.

The mail carrier expects to post a $6 billion loss for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. Last month, the Postal Service said it logged a $740 million loss for the latest quarter to lock in a seventh-consecutive year of annual losses.

In a letter to customers, Board of Governors Chairman Mickey Barnett cited the agency’s “precarious financial condition” and the “uncertain path” for legislation reforming the Postal Service as reasons to seek a higher-than-usual price hike.

The Postal Service business model — a monopoly on daily first class mail to every home — simply doesn’t work. It is well past time to usher in competition for the service. As it always does, competition forces all the players to be more efficient, and that means consumers win. Those businesses that can’t provide a service at a competitive price will fail. Those that can will prosper. Here’s Doug Bandow writing for Forbes earlier this year.

Instead, Congress should open the postal marketplace to competition and innovation. The idea only seems radical in the U.S. In recent years Australia, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Indonesia, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Spain, and Sweden all liberalized their postal regimes. Some have dropped the government monopoly, allowed competition, privatized government operations, or adopted more limited steps. Indeed, the European Union has forced its members to open their markets.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that such reforms had yielded “quality of service improvements, increases in profitability, increases in employment and real reductions in prices.” In yet another area the supposedly laissez-faire U.S. lags behind “socialist” Europe in market innovation.

Let’s get on with it.