(FORTUNE Magazine) – At last, an extremist is going to deal with the U.S. Postal Service. To be sure, the bomb thrower in question is only a consulting firm. But the firm being retained to study the Postalites is newly established Perot Systems Corp., whose boss is widely understood not to be an incrementalist. ''Nuke the GM system'' was Ross Perot's bottom line on another organization he studied recently. Surely he can be no less Manichaean in passing judgment on U.S.P.S. The news stories indicate that for openers Perot's firm will study the Postal Service's internal transportation, telecommunications, delivery services, money handling, and mail transportation equipment systems. Somehow that does not seem like enough. Among numerous other questions screaming for elaboration, our own first choice would be: How do you get a mailman to quit? In a normal organization, you try to hold down the quit rate. But in the upside-down world of U.S.P.S., the low quit rate is a maddening reminder that over 700,000 workers know they have a sweet deal. Quit rate for U.S.P.S. in the Eighties: around 1% to 2%. In the private sector, it is often over 10%. About the sweet deal: A wage-comparability study performed by Michael Wachter of the University of Pennsylvania shows that postal workers earn 20% more than those with comparable skills in the private sector. The average new hire at U.S.P.S. increases his salary by close to 25%. Since labor costs are still around 85% of total costs in the organization, all talk of efficiency is blather while those wage premiums persist. A second question would be: How do you get rid of all the characters who have been corrupted by this situation? Oh, sure, thousands of postal workers are nice guys and lovely ladies. But they are working in a system that, built on a giant union rip-off, would be unimaginable in a competitive private corporation where people earn their pay or get fired. The system endlessly depresses morale, and we hold it responsible in part for the ''I'm All Right, Jack'' mentality that produced last winter's saga of the Superbowl pool. For those who missed out on this unmade Alec Guinness movie, it began in the early winter of 1987 when the New York Daily News offered $100,000 in cash to readers able to predict the exact score of the Giants-Broncos game. To qualify, a reader had to get his entry postmarked at least two days before the game (played January 25). Reading those rules, many postal workers in the New York area evidently had the same thought. They used their access to postmarking equipment to stamp and then withdraw empty envelopes. After the game was over, they put the correct score (Giants 39, Broncos 20) into those envelopes and sent them off into the system. Only when the winners met each other at a Daily News dinner featuring Giants quarterback Phil Simms did they realize that some of their brothers in the system were just as crooked as themselves. Our final question is: Who needs the Postal Service? Why are we protecting the U.S.P.S. monopoly on first-class and third-class mail when all we get for it is less service and higher prices? The standard answer to this question, delivered yet again this spring by Postmaster General Anthony Frank, is that the postal monopoly is our only defense against ''cream skimmers'' -- businessmen who, if allowed to take over mail deliveries, would serve only affluent urban areas and ignore the guy who lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon (an example that actually keeps coming up in arguments about U.S.P.S.). A funny thing about this argument is that nobody ever applies it to the piano- moving business, which we happen to know is underserving folks in the Canyon basement. Or to 10,000 other businesses that find it reasonable to link their services to the costs thereof. Maybe they all need to be nationalized. Or are we sounding like an extremist?