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The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

inthepublicinterest.org

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Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#501

Post by dungdang »

gameswithgo wrote: post #300
dungdang wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when the cost of his letter is 10x more than he was charged, and the of mine is 10x less than i was charged, i don't pay more? seriously you don't understand? wow. we go to dinner. you get a side salad, and i get a steak and some wine. we split the bill down the middle. cool? i'm not trying to diss you. i want to be friends with you.

you are bot forced to use the usps, you are not actually using it, so you are not paying the rest. these sort of imbalances generally disappear in aggregate (sometimes your letter goes to a farm) and/or are worth the simplicity anyway, should you ever choose to take part.

you know litetally nothing about this. we are literally, by law, forced to use usps for letters. this is what people have been fighting against for 150 years. letting private services deliver mail. the last time a company tried this, in 1854 i think, they were shut down for breaking the the law - procecuted by the government.

it's not 'worth the simplicity' to me, living in a high rent city. literally every piece of mail in an urban area is 10x it's actual delivery cost, which pays for the farmer's mail, and him getting all the spam, which actually costs 10x more than he pays. exponentially more people live in cities. every time you get your bank statement delivered in a city, you and 20 others just paid for a single letter to be delivered to a farmer. through shittier interest rates in your savings account. yes, i rarely mail letters. like 10 times a year. and same goes for the 3 million other people in my city. and yet because of low farmland population, urbanites still mail many more total letters vs farmers.

we're not paying for it? whi, pray tell, do you think is paying for that farmer to send a letter? he pays half a dollar for a stamp. the post office spends about $10 to deliver it. my letter costs a penny to deliver. i pay half a dollar too.

so no, it is not 'worth the simplicity' to me, to pay for that farmer. but federal law forces me to.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#502

Post by dungdang »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #278
dungdang wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

exactly.

You’re commenting like you won, but everyone else is just confused what your original point was.

my point, mr sherlock holmes, is that the comment i was replying to is whataboutism. and by 'everyone' i assume you mean yourself and the couple of people who downvoted due to their stupidity. that's not just not everyone. it's literally almost no one, out of the hundreds who read it and understood just fine. like any person of even below average iq can.

federal law makes it illegal for anyone but usps to deliver letters? rich people want to allow competition on letter delivery? but billionairs bad, so usps should have a monopoly. this is what the comment i replied to said. get it now? next i'll show you tje bunny method if tying your laces, so no more need for those velcro shoes little guy!

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#503

Post by kristopolous »

nickff wrote: post #499
kristopolous wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A government is an organization explicit, implicit, loose, tight, chartered, unchartered, natural? > granted by whom, to whom, under what authority, given by what, enforced by what and applicable to what and whom > a monopoly (or oligopoly) determined and defined by whom? enforced by whom? > on the legitimate same question > use of arbitrary, restrained, indefinite, transparent, accountable, proportionate? what are…

If you'd like answers to all the questions in the first half of your post, I suggest you read Huemer's book.

Yes, there are answers, many many many answers by different people, that conflict and are mutually exclusive. That's the whole point.

The Heritage Foundation does this all the time. Depending on whose paying the bills they will use the exact same arguments to draw different sets of conclusions on the exact same topics. They're just tools of arbitrary application It's a box that fits anything you'd like

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#504

Post by tptacek »

kasey_junk wrote: post #460
harryh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can FedEx an absentee ballot. There is no requirement to use USPS.

Who pays for it?

Presumably the states, striking up deals with preferred carriers; a good number of states already do something like this to prepay postage for USPS ballots.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#505

Post by topkai22 »

bhupy wrote: post #274
cryptoz wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with a government-run grocery store? I can quickly think of a hundred reasons why I would support such an idea. And no reasons yet why I wouldn't support it. But you make it sound like a government-run grocery store is massively crossing a line for you. So I am curious about that.

The GP was justifying USPS's monopoly on first class mail. A government-run grocery store sounds pretty great. A government-run monopoly on grocery stores...not so much.

For reference, the US Government runs thousands of grocery and convenience stores via the US Military exchange (PX) and commissary apparatus. I remember these stores being a fantastic benefit of being a Navy brat.

The structure also hints at problems with government run businesses- the PX system avoids all sorts of sales and property taxes and gets reduced or free rent. The commissaries do that and get direct subsidies as well.

Before any service members (or their spouses) go after me, no, I am NOT arguing for any change to the system, just pointing out how existing examples look and work.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#506

Post by abiogenesis »

seebetter wrote: post #475
teslabox wrote: post #25

There are various advocates for allowing the USPS to return to the banking business. They would put the exploitative check cashing stores out of business. Ellen Brown's has written a copy pieces advocating for postal banking. What We Could Do with a Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure that Doesn’t Cost Taxpayers a Dime - https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do-with-a-po... (2013) This piece concludes by su…

Why can't a person open a bank account? I mean, I can't because I sold some bitcoin via Bank of America 4-years ago. Someone stole my info, I reported it as fraud and BoA reported me for fraud -- and all my bank accounts closed. And they refuse to fix it.

By the same logic post office could have blacklisted you too.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#507

Post by manquer »

cheez wrote: post #420
manquer wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works in India because elections are federally managed , and poll workers are federal employees who have to do the duty . In US the rules are per state and complicated also while mostly paid poll workers are really volunteering for the job . The second part surprises me all the time , US May have lesser polling booths if they have lesser people volunteer to be poll workers . Despite collecting so much tax and have…

States are there to implement federal guidelines as well as their own. Nothing stops the US federal government from passing a constitutional amendment or a law that forces this type of setup. Aside from the corruption you mentioned lol

Constitutional changes have to be ratified by at least 3/4 of the states so not really under federal government, unless the states buy-in as well.

Of course it is lack of political will to make changes that is always the problem.

In this case there is no intent as well. It is like congress voting its own salary? It took 202 years to pass the 27th Amendment after all and it has the just most basic of safeguards on compensation.

The legislation governing legislators such as election laws, salary, term limits etc should not be controlled by them, this is a major flaw in many democratic systems.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#508

Post by benhurmarcel »

jedberg wrote: post #303

The USPS missed a golden opportunity in the 90s. Almost no one had an email address in the early 90s. The USPS was so afraid of email they refused to embrace it. They could have been the email address of record for everyone in the US if they just set up a forwarding address for anyone who wanted it. Heck, they could even do it now. Imagine having a free foo@me.us email address that someone could only send to if they…

In France the post office (La Poste) did this from 2000. It did have success, in the following years a lot of people used it as their main email service. They even were mandated by the government to automatically provide an account for all school students.

But they couldn't keep up with more modern services. Their webmail and storage was laughable compared to Gmail and others, and people moved on. They still operate, but it's basically just for older people who never changed now.

Post office companies can't compete with tech giants on email services.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#509

Post by djur »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #474
djur wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not profitable at the rates necessary to keep them universal.

The example you're using is election mail. That's paid for by the government. How is it possible for the rate they'd have to pay in a competitive market with low margins to make it non-universal and yet it isn't already? If you want to deliver to everybody then you have to pay the cost to deliver to everybody , one way or the other. Subsidizing it through more expensive postage (disproportionately paid for by the poo…

Yes, I agree that the US Postal Service should be directly funded by the US government, not through postage.

Re: The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf]

#510

Post by djur »

mindcrime wrote: post #479
djur wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In deontological terms, taxation is not theft, because theft is the unlawful taking of property, and taxation is lawful. To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state, and most people are not going to accept that premise, which is why libertarian rhetoric in practice tends to rely on casuistic arguments about waste-fraud-and-abuse, red tape, and so on.

and taxation is lawful. And that notion is what many of us reject. To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state Not exactly, although plenty of Libertarians do reject the legitimacy of the State out of hand. I find the issue to be more nuanced than that. If you hold, as Bastiat did, that "the law" (aka "the State") can be something like - but no more than - the "collective extens…

Private property is a monopoly on the use of natural resources granted by law and enforced by the threat of physical harm. As soon as you admit the possibility of competition for natural resources you have introduced law, and at that point the only question is who shall enforce the law and for whose benefit. There is no answer to that question that is provably correct, but so far "states, for the benefit of their political constituency" has been the answer that has overwhelmingly outcompeted all others, and the vast majority of effective political disagreement in the modern era is between statists regarding exactly how a state's political constituency should be defined and how best to benefit it.
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