81–90 of 156 posts
German railroad system worked pretty well, then it got partially privatized around 20 years ago. Supposingly cheaper that way. Turned out, cost were cut regarding infrastructure to make it cheaper. Today, the railroad system is terrible and the administration just agreed to spend 100 billion dollars on it. Do you want quality sustained over decades? Then prioritize quality over cost and keep it public. Do you want in…
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USPS as a public entity of the US government is required to deliver mail to all addresses. I don't know all the specific details and I'm sure there's some exceptions for getting service to a new location but existing locations cannot be removed. There is daily USPS service to a postbox at the bottom of the Grand Canyon that is only accessible by mule paths. I guarantee this service would either be cancelled or go up…
> There is daily USPS service to a postbox at the bottom of the Grand Canyon that is only accessible by mule paths. I guarantee this service would either be cancelled or go up in cost to thousands of dollars per letter if USPS was privatized. You say that like it's a bad thing. Why does a hill billy who insists on living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon deserve a subsidy? That public money would be better spend help…
I'm going to say this nicely once instead of the reply I really wanted to say because I'll give you the benefit of the doubt of not knowing or looking it up.
Because it provides postal service to the Havasupai people living on their native land at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Would you like to take a guess as to why Supai, Arizona, the capital of the Havasupai Nation, is located at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
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USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Besides that junk mail might actually increase if a private company was paid to take it to your house since they would have a profit motive - more junk mail delivered means more profits.
> USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.
Which county is that?
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Is it? I don't think I would miss the junk mail delivery service if it went away entirely.
Junk mail is a net positive for postal service revenue. Even if you could eliminate it (major free speech concern), would it be a good idea? Who would pay extra when the can just throw out the junk in less than 2 minutes a week?
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I think the problem being solved here is largely one of waste. USPS hides 9bn of unfunded pension obligations every year and underserves urban areas to subsidize rural areas. Mail volume is also generally falling as everything moves to email, so it is getting both less profitable and less critical. The US is a rich country, we can afford to waste a lot of money and not notice, and of course one person's waste is anot…
I'm not aware of any organization that has the same requirements to fund its future pension obligations that the USPS has. That requirement was created by Congress as part of a sustained campaign to damage the USPS. It seems like your argument is actually that Congress should rescind that requirement, so that USPS can afford to better service urban customers while continuing to be a critical lifeline to rural areas.
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"The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" The wording "shall" is what I meant by weird wording. But no roads? No post offices? Whatever. The constitution is extremely flawed and should be abandoned.
"Just build it from scratch, can't be that hard" - every software engineer at some point in the past. It is that hard and even harder. An then you have the problem that politicians and societies have a hard time to decide on topics of much narrower scope and much smaller impact. That said, I would love to for the US having a solid checks and balances system instead of the current system. If you want to look at a case…
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USA is large and people live everywhere, including hard to get spots. USPS just works in all those places. Privatization would discriminate against those people in a heartbeat. See: rural broadband in the US.
Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination.
Yes, it is discrimination. Treating people differently on any basis is discrimination on that basis.
It may or may not be illegal discrimination depending on the specifics and the governing law, and it may or may not be unjust discrimination depending on the specifics and the applicable moral framework, but all discrimination means is differential treatment on some criteria.
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Germany is 4% of America in size. A single US state with decent population density wouldn't need a nationalized system either. The USPS gets a monopoly because it is required to go everywhere. If a private company doesn't want to go into Michigan it doesn't have to. Without a monopoly protection USPS goes from being slightly unprofitable to very unprofitable by companies competing only in cheap areas. Basically USPS…
They could auction off a universal service obligation to willing bidders. No need to run a federal agency with a monopoly for that. (And everything you explain could also be accomplished by state-run services, no need to involve the federal level.)
After all what constitutes not servicing?
How would a state run service be better?
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Is it? I don't think I would miss the junk mail delivery service if it went away entirely.
prime “can’t see the forest for the trees” sort of thinking, here