Pretty important asterisk concerning the privatization of the Japanese rail network: this privatization led to the closure of a lot of rural, unprofitable lines. IMO this would play out similarly for the USPS; it's not hard to remain profitable when you can just cleave off the parts of your public service that are in the red.
I read the whole article, and it had a lot of informed discussion within it, but ultimately that discussion felt a little pointless.
The crisis is manufactured, the debate of “what to do” or “what would happen if privatization happens?” does not need to be a discussion.
The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress.
If it’s unprofitable, it’s barely unprofitable, especially in the scope of government services.
How many days of the Iran war would fully fund the USPS’ operating budget deficit for a year?
I’m not even sure that corporate lobbyists will be happy with privatization. For example, both FedEx and UPS rely on USPS for last mile delivery of some types of packages. What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week? Are they going to be happy when one of their most effective forms of marketing doubles in price or shrinks down to 3 day a week service?
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.
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?
> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress.
Huh? Even Germany managed to privatise their snail mail, and approximately no one would want to renationalise it.
What makes USPS a 'no-brainer public service'? What's the big benefit of having government snail mail?
I don’t know anything about Germany’s postal service.
In the US, what the parent comment was getting it, is why are we even talking about this in the first place? What problem is privatization trying to solve?
As an American, I have zero complaints about our postal service or how much we pay for it. Apart from the fact that I wish there were more branch offices and a few more workers at most locations. I don’t think privatization will solve either of those.
Why do we need to reform something that already works?
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 another person's easier job or subsidized service, but given the ongoing decline in the importance of mail (vs package) delivery, it's not clear that this is a particularly important utility for the government to maintain any more.
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.
Well, if postal services were provided by normal private companies, then there would be none (or less) of that kind of political interference you are complaining about here.
The USPS is about $100 billion short in funds for retiree healthcare. Operationally they're slated to run out of cash shortly and that's going to get worse as they have to directly fund more and more retiree health care.
1. They do a really bad job because you can't get fired
2. My package is delivered late yet again
3. I don't bother calling because the other 8 times I did I wasted an hour, nobody did anything (because nobody can get fired) and I didn't get any money back
4. Look how great we're doing! Complaints are down
5. Give us more funding because we're doing such a good job
This is just as likely of a spiral if we keep it publicly owned. It's also not good. How do you get good outcomes with.no accountability?
Sure, it's not perfect, but I'm doubtful privatizing it would make it any better. And on the list of things I want fixed in the US, it is far from the top.
I spent many years shipping out online orders every day via UPS, Fedex, and USPS. USPS was not meaningfully worse in aggregate, UPS and FedEx still fucked up plenty
> My problem rate with Fedex or UPS is maybe 0.1% of packages. I can't remember the last time I had a delivery issue.
Well… I had a package being delivered, and it had missed its estimated arrival; it ended with me have a long discussion w/ their support that I'm sure was fed to /dev/null. FedEx was the carrier, it turned out, and they claimed they had attempted delivery. Problem was, they required a signature. I live in an apartment, & we have a dedicated package room. But FedEx's stance is that they can't deliver to the secure package room: they require a signature. But at my apartment, they come to the door with the street address on it. Weirdly, that is not the door with the buzzer — that's at a separate, more remote door. The delivery person is not going to take the time to find that door, assuming their corporate overlord's maximum dwell time even permits them to. So they can't buzz me. So they sticker an utterly arbitrary window on the building, and leave. The landlord clears the window. I am never notified.
Somewhere this kicks around in their system until I get a call from an unknown number of "hey your package is undeliverable." But the "guaranteed" delivery date was overshot, of course.
I was, of course, home the entire time. These are what spawn the "missed delivery" memes … https://xkcd.com/921/
This is a systemic problem, not just a "one time" issue: every package shipped via FedEx that requires a signature to me is undeliverable.
The shipper (my bank, in this case) was also less-than-helpful: they apparently have no idea who they ship with, let alone what tracking number they used. Worse, they refused to refund me the extra I had paid to expedite the shipment (which, as you can imagine from the above, did not arrive on time; worse, the expiditing fee was extortionary…)
… and this is modern capitalism these days. A fractal of bad service where the customer ends up having to do 90% of the support work.
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.
Refusing service entirely kinda feels like more like something that fits the word “discrimination.” UPS/FedEx can refuse service to you for almost any reason.
But, perhaps you’re right, maybe the word “discrimination” is the wrong word. Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet.
USPS from an operations standpoint is pretty much profitable. Congress basically doesn’t even allow USPS to fix itself when it absolutely can fix itself without major service cuts or privatization. For example, their pension fund can only invest in low-yield securities, while normal companies have more flexibility, so that inflates the cost of their retirement program.
You can auction off the universal service obligation to willing bidders without having a state owned enterprise with a government monopoly.
> Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet.
Rural areas extract and produce many resources that urban areas depend on. Agriculture, fishing, oil, gas, uranium, wood, maple syrup, etc.
You can’t get workforces to live in those places or businesses to operate there if there’s no roads, internet, mail, schools, hospitals, etc (or if those things are prohibitively expensive).
Don’t forget that subsidy doesn’t always mean the difference between whether it’s expensive or not, it can also mean the difference between having and not having.
Another reason is that too much regional wealth inequality can be bad for national stability. It can lead to things like civil wars and unrest.
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 needs $0.78 to mail a one ounce letter overall. However it doesn't need that much for you to mail within the same city, it is probably much less than that.
But they do need it if you send a letter across the country.
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 in cost to thousands of dollars per letter if USPS was privatized. The sheer size and remoteness of parts of the USA is why it's a public good.
Public goods can be contracted out to private entities. And this can be done independently in each region, without having a single central contractor.
EU countries privatized their postal services decades ago, because governments are not allowed to compete with private entities in the market (unless explicitly allowed by EU-wide laws). And because the idea felt good, the same privatization extended to territories outside the EU, such as Greenland.
> 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 helping poor people.
> Why does a hill billy who insists on living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon deserve a subsidy?
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.
Lower prices, bigger volume in the market. And the privatised Deutsche Post (/ DHL) is now a world beating logistics company that makes plenty of profit, instead of subsidies and bleeding red ink all over.
However Germany still has plenty of government interference in snail mail, like a universal service mandate (or a sector specific minimum wage).
Denmark dropped that requirement, and Danish society hasn't collapsed so far.
Post is a natural monopoly, at a national scale. It is much more efficient to have a single centralized service doing all mail delivery than several competing services doing the same.
It isn't completely non-rivalrous, but the marginal cost of delivering a parcel diminishes as the number of parcels delivered in an area goes up.
If the USPS were fully privatized without strict government subsidies or mandates, rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges or lose service entirely.
> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt
electorate.
Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there.
Once there member choices are shaped by the people who contact and persuade them.
If the USPS is poorly funded or managed, it’s because US electorate either wanted that, or was inattentive about the relevant funding and management and cares more about other things.
And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want.
Most Americans also prefer to blame political folk devils to for the failures instead, and seem to be more happy with that than personal and community discipline that would be necessary to engage responsibly, though, so the system is arguably working to reflect people’s revealed preferences already.
EDIT: I should probably add that it’s not obvious to me that it’s poorly managed. I’ve enjoyed decades of adequate-to-impressive service via USPS over a variety of locations.
"And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want."
I hate this. There is plenty of research showing that the opinion of the broader electorate has almost no influence on most policies. Only lobbyists and donors count.
Elections still have consequences, right? I’d think the fallout between fall of 2024 and now illustrates that. And that was the choice of the electorate (unless someone can demonstrate results were tampered with). So voter choices count.
There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters.
Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most officeholders try to keep their promises:
I agree lobbyists have influence. What is a lobbyist and why aren’t more people lobbying?
Donors also have influence, and yet the electorate has every opportunity to determine who donors must influence every election. Why would they choose someone who is only beholden to donors?
This argument assumes that Congress does what the electorate wants.
In a system where money in politics is unlimited (US v. Citizens United), elections consist of a first past the post two-party system, the president is not elected by popular vote, investigative media has been gutted and consolidated into oligarchal ownership, and proportional representation doesn’t exist (see: Washington DC residents have no representation, senators per Californian versus senators per Wyoming resident, gerrymandered districts) I don’t think we can blame the electorate for Congress not doing things that the people want.
Money distorts the system in some ways and I agree that’s a problem that could use systemic mitigation (farther back than Citizen’s United probably, Buckley vs Valeo is arguably the deeper roots).
But ultimately, money doesn’t remove the fundamental electoral mechanisms (yet) or opportunity for volunteer direct lobbying. It primarily distorts to the degree that it can be used to buy the focus of the electorate and to the degree it can be used to buy other people’s lobbying time.
People could spend their time managing their own political /public policy focus and volunteer lobbying instead of any other leisure activities. I’ve done it and I know others who do. Most Americans don’t, and that’s a revealed preference. Other leisure activities are more important.
The process of lobbying Congress involves physically showing up to the congressional offices in Washington DC, meeting with congressional staff, and often submitting draft legislation, which essentially requires a law degree to have the technical ability to write something of that sort.
Walmart is the largest private employer in America and they are have the most employees in America who receive SNAP benefits due to their lower income status.
I think we can’t create the step-by-step plan and budget for someone who works at Walmart as a cashier for how they’ll engage in the lobbying system. It’s just not possible.
Sure, there’s a lot of free things you can do to be an activist and make your voice heard, but it’s not at the same amplitude.
We can’t blame apathy and leisure when so many people don’t even have the budget for most forms of leisure.
You’re correct that time is the fundamental challenge. It’s also really what the money is always a proxy for at some level.
Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they represent, most have multiple. Most people don’t use them for the same reason they outsource their understanding of current events to Fox News or Rogan & guests. Some people do contact offices by phone or message, but fewer band together with others who care about a policy topic and leverage collective influence.
Sure it’s hard and time consuming. I’m not speaking from a position of full ability or particular privilege (though I have enough time to post on HN). But it’s also a bit like the old saw about meditation — 10 minutes a day, and if you’re too busy, 20 minutes. The activities themselves don’t always produce immediate leverage but once they lock in the return is powerful.
I get where you’re coming from, truly. I do also wish people were more politically engaged. But I just can’t go that far toward victim blaming, especially when so many forces work against people doing exactly what you suggested they do.
Just look at how Occupy Wall Street was broken up and twisted into irrelevancy by our media. It was a nonpartisan movement that corporate influence successfully split off into the two warring sides so that critical mass could never be achieved.
Any issue that is perfectly partisan never gets resolved, and the oligarchs know exactly how to turn most issues in that direction.
My prediction is that the data center and AI backlash could work exactly the same way if resistance grows too strong.
When the electorate is literally the mechanism by which officeholders are selected, how is the electorate not responsible?
This is not the same situation as someone who is the victim of a violent crime they didn’t volunteer for, choosing language that creates that confusion won’t change the reality that officeholders are chosen by the electorate.
Why not both? Yes, there are systemic issues in the US. But 70% of the US either voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all in 2024.
(Let me pause to pre-empt any bothsideism by saying that I think that’s silly and I doubt you’ll change my mind on that, but you can try)
Continuing on - liberals tend to point at systemic issues, but personal responsibility is a thing too. I’m a bit tired of the “education this, social media that” arguments. I grew up in rural Texas, one of the most conservative, fundamentalist, and poorly educated states in the US. By the time I was 14 I rejected the then nascent Fox-style fascism and bigotry I was surrounded by at home and church, because I actually bothered to seek out information on the internet and hear the other side even when it was uncomfortable or felt morally repugnant to me
I don’t say this to congratulate myself (or maybe I do, deep down). I try to stay humble and I feel that I succeed in that to the extent that I have often had self esteem issues. I genuinely have tried to see the other side. Everyone in my family is conservative. It would make my life easier if I didn't have the cognitive dissonance of caring about them while at the same time frankly reckoning with the fact that I consider them weak and stupid people that I would never associate with if we didn't have history. It feels mean and bad to say that out loud, but no matter how much I try to repress it, it's the way I feel. I really don't want to be someone that lets politics come in the way of relationships, but at some point it's a matter of personal values
So after 2024, I have to say, what the hell is wrong with the people in this country? Why is everyone so stupid, selfish and easily misled? There are so many legitimately interesting and inherently difficult problems to be solved with politics, and so far in my 30 years I’ve only seen conservatives blowing the United State’s huge lead by clogging up all of the political bandwidth of the entire country with barefaced bigotry. I’m so tired of it. 2024 was a breaking point for me. I don’t know how I can identify with or be proud of this country.
I still think the USPS banking idea would be a really great one.
Easier profit than a regular bank because the “branches” already have to exist, closes banking gaps for underserved populations, perhaps some other benefits I haven’t even considered.
If you privatize the post office, then either mail-in voting stops completely, or else a private company can control which mail-in ballots get delivered, and which ones don't.
Yes, it also had a mandate to deliver mail. So people living in the middle of nowhere New Mexico can do something like run a small business through delivery (this was on the radio the last time this nonsense was floated). It's actually kind of beautiful, something that I can't imagine would work with a privately owned system.
They'd end up charging you the amount of money you'd make sending the package, that's how all these forms of rentierism work: Uber, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, etc. Private taxes they want to force onto people.
Must fight it at any opportunity. I can't imagine the economic value something like USPS brings to the country, likely trillions of trillions over it's lifespan. Something the corpos would never admit.
And general delivery*, media mail**, passports, money orders, stamps, and collectables. Furthermore, nation-state post offices should provide free basic banking services to everyone to eliminate unbanked status.
* Delivery to a post office for an individual without a delivery address
** Low cost media shipping excluding comic books, games, and magazines containing advertisements
The postal service was in the constitution from the beginning - Washington signed it. But the wording is a bit weird - obviously there's supposed to be a postal service but now with how bad tings have become, who knows.
Huh, where's the postal service in the constitution?
As far as I can tell your constitution allows the federal level to regulate postal services, but it does not require the establishment of government snail mail.
"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 study regarding a 'more modern' constitution: the German (de facto) constitution is only around 80 years old.
Interestingly, both the US and German constitution were written explicitly to limit the power of the federal level. But in both systems the federal level grabbed more and more power as time went on. (Partially because that's also popular with the voters.)
What's so confusing about that? Presumably the constitution assumes that normal roads are for the more local layers of government to deal with.
I interpret 'shall have power' to mean 'if they want to, they can do it'. Doesn't mean they have. Eg they have the power to levy tariffs on foreign trade, but the constitution is perfectly happy with free trade, too.
That's quite a non sequitur there. The wording is weird, so we should abandon the entire constitution?
Not so fast, comrade. Not so fast. You've got a lot of work ahead of you to fill in the gaps in your logic here, before any of us are going to agree with your conclusion.
A Soviet joke goes like this: "Daddy, daddy, they've said on the radio that vodka price goes up next month! Does it mean that you won't drink as much anymore?" — "No, son, it means that you won't eat as much no more".
So. The new private owner(s) will try to increase their profit. Increasing the efficiency of the processes already in place while providing the same services with the same coverage/quality/etc. at the same prices is indeed one way to increase the profit... but it's one of the hardest ways. Hiking up the prices and discontinuing services with smallest margins is a much simpler, easier, and even more effort-efficient way so this is what's going to happen first.
It means prices will go up and service/quality will go down. I already consider the service sort of at a base state. If it gets any worse, it will just go under. Which is what they want.
It's already a (public) corporation. You can send mail through the non-profit, old postal service. You have to measure the postage yourself and put it in the slot called non-domestic mail.
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 inevitable enshitififaction and something that barely works good enough? Privatize it.
It's a casualty of political corruption, both moral in terms of Party first politics and run-of-the-mill crony capitalism. That's what it means.
The consequences are far reaching for many existing industries. It may never be unraveled once initiated. It will give rise to more concentrated wealth and power. This is by design.
The same could be said about many organizations within companies if you don't give them a proper budget. Once you start actually caring about being profitable it turns out that you can find how to do things in a way that is less wasteful. Cost acts as an incentive to reduce waste and if you remove it then there is no force to combat waste or unsustainable practices.
>It’s not that private entities won’t deliver postal service; it’s that they quite literally can’t.
If you paid someone $10,000 to deliver a letter to somewhere in the country I'm sure they could find a way to bring it there. It is not impossible.
Yeah, of course they can/could, it's just that it does not make sense from an economic point of view. Which directly circles back to the beginning "USPS is not profitable".
Pretty important asterisk concerning the privatization of the Japanese rail network: this privatization led to the closure of a lot of rural, unprofitable lines. IMO this would play out similarly for the USPS; it's not hard to remain profitable when you can just cleave off the parts of your public service that are in the red.
JR also owns tons of valuable real estate that brings them recurring revenue
I read the whole article, and it had a lot of informed discussion within it, but ultimately that discussion felt a little pointless.
The crisis is manufactured, the debate of “what to do” or “what would happen if privatization happens?” does not need to be a discussion.
The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress.
If it’s unprofitable, it’s barely unprofitable, especially in the scope of government services.
How many days of the Iran war would fully fund the USPS’ operating budget deficit for a year?
I’m not even sure that corporate lobbyists will be happy with privatization. For example, both FedEx and UPS rely on USPS for last mile delivery of some types of packages. What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week? Are they going to be happy when one of their most effective forms of marketing doubles in price or shrinks down to 3 day a week service?
Is it? I don't think I would miss the junk mail delivery service if it went away entirely.
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.
How does that square with their universal service obligation?
Which county is that?
Charge junk mail the same rate as first class. More money for the post office? That's a win. Or less junk mail? Also a win.
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?
A privatised postal service could capture this as well to finance rural delivery.
prime “can’t see the forest for the trees” sort of thinking, here
> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt Congress.
Huh? Even Germany managed to privatise their snail mail, and approximately no one would want to renationalise it.
What makes USPS a 'no-brainer public service'? What's the big benefit of having government snail mail?
Mail delivery service is not a public good. It's both excludable and rivalrous. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
> What about all the companies that send me junk mail 6 days a week?
Effectively calling USPS the 'federal agency of paper spam delivery' doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement?
I don’t know anything about Germany’s postal service.
In the US, what the parent comment was getting it, is why are we even talking about this in the first place? What problem is privatization trying to solve?
As an American, I have zero complaints about our postal service or how much we pay for it. Apart from the fact that I wish there were more branch offices and a few more workers at most locations. I don’t think privatization will solve either of those.
Why do we need to reform something that already works?
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 another person's easier job or subsidized service, but given the ongoing decline in the importance of mail (vs package) delivery, it's not clear that this is a particularly important utility for the government to maintain any more.
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.
Well, if postal services were provided by normal private companies, then there would be none (or less) of that kind of political interference you are complaining about here.
The USPS is about $100 billion short in funds for retiree healthcare. Operationally they're slated to run out of cash shortly and that's going to get worse as they have to directly fund more and more retiree health care.
My problem rate with Fedex or UPS is maybe 0.1% of packages. I can't remember the last time I had a delivery issue.
Just this week I had a package that was supposed to be delivered by Monday that lost tracking and didn't show up until Wednesday.
It might be "basically fine and good enough" but it's definitely not "amazing and completely beyond reproach" at least in my opinion.
> Just this week I had a package that was supposed to be delivered by Monday that lost tracking and didn't show up until Wednesday.
This is the sort of problem you solve with more funding not privatization.
Here’s how these privatizations work:
1. Cut funding for public service
2. Service becomes bad
3. Cut more funding because service is bad and unused
4. Service becomes worse
5. Privatize
6. Strip the service for parts, a bunch of people get rich, classic PE stuff but worse
7. Start extracting rents, you have a nice monopoly
8. Public has no or worse service for higher cost
1. They do a really bad job because you can't get fired
2. My package is delivered late yet again
3. I don't bother calling because the other 8 times I did I wasted an hour, nobody did anything (because nobody can get fired) and I didn't get any money back
4. Look how great we're doing! Complaints are down
5. Give us more funding because we're doing such a good job
This is just as likely of a spiral if we keep it publicly owned. It's also not good. How do you get good outcomes with.no accountability?
Sure, it's not perfect, but I'm doubtful privatizing it would make it any better. And on the list of things I want fixed in the US, it is far from the top.
All shopping companies lose packages, damage packages, and fail to deliver on time as promised.
The question is just about the rate it happens and the ease with which you can get restitution.
Remember when Amazon’s delivery dates were commitments instead of estimates? That was interesting for me to think about in this context.
I spent many years shipping out online orders every day via UPS, Fedex, and USPS. USPS was not meaningfully worse in aggregate, UPS and FedEx still fucked up plenty
> My problem rate with Fedex or UPS is maybe 0.1% of packages. I can't remember the last time I had a delivery issue.
Well… I had a package being delivered, and it had missed its estimated arrival; it ended with me have a long discussion w/ their support that I'm sure was fed to /dev/null. FedEx was the carrier, it turned out, and they claimed they had attempted delivery. Problem was, they required a signature. I live in an apartment, & we have a dedicated package room. But FedEx's stance is that they can't deliver to the secure package room: they require a signature. But at my apartment, they come to the door with the street address on it. Weirdly, that is not the door with the buzzer — that's at a separate, more remote door. The delivery person is not going to take the time to find that door, assuming their corporate overlord's maximum dwell time even permits them to. So they can't buzz me. So they sticker an utterly arbitrary window on the building, and leave. The landlord clears the window. I am never notified.
Somewhere this kicks around in their system until I get a call from an unknown number of "hey your package is undeliverable." But the "guaranteed" delivery date was overshot, of course.
I was, of course, home the entire time. These are what spawn the "missed delivery" memes … https://xkcd.com/921/
This is a systemic problem, not just a "one time" issue: every package shipped via FedEx that requires a signature to me is undeliverable.
The shipper (my bank, in this case) was also less-than-helpful: they apparently have no idea who they ship with, let alone what tracking number they used. Worse, they refused to refund me the extra I had paid to expedite the shipment (which, as you can imagine from the above, did not arrive on time; worse, the expiditing fee was extortionary…)
… and this is modern capitalism these days. A fractal of bad service where the customer ends up having to do 90% of the support work.
Special case pain in your rear. Sorry that happened.
FYI, I am quite sure that you can provide special delivery instructions for your address to FedEx. You should try to figure out how to do that.
Dealing with your bank, though… good luck with that when they don’t care.
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.
> 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.
Refusing service entirely kinda feels like more like something that fits the word “discrimination.” UPS/FedEx can refuse service to you for almost any reason.
But, perhaps you’re right, maybe the word “discrimination” is the wrong word. Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet.
USPS from an operations standpoint is pretty much profitable. Congress basically doesn’t even allow USPS to fix itself when it absolutely can fix itself without major service cuts or privatization. For example, their pension fund can only invest in low-yield securities, while normal companies have more flexibility, so that inflates the cost of their retirement program.
You can auction off the universal service obligation to willing bidders without having a state owned enterprise with a government monopoly.
> Either way, from a national policy standpoint there are very good reasons to subsidize rural areas for basic infrastructure services like mail and internet.
Please tell me a few.
Sure!
Rural areas extract and produce many resources that urban areas depend on. Agriculture, fishing, oil, gas, uranium, wood, maple syrup, etc.
You can’t get workforces to live in those places or businesses to operate there if there’s no roads, internet, mail, schools, hospitals, etc (or if those things are prohibitively expensive).
Don’t forget that subsidy doesn’t always mean the difference between whether it’s expensive or not, it can also mean the difference between having and not having.
Another reason is that too much regional wealth inequality can be bad for national stability. It can lead to things like civil wars and unrest.
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 needs $0.78 to mail a one ounce letter overall. However it doesn't need that much for you to mail within the same city, it is probably much less than that.
But they do need it if you send a letter across the country.
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.)
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 in cost to thousands of dollars per letter if USPS was privatized. The sheer size and remoteness of parts of the USA is why it's a public good.
https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/
Public goods can be contracted out to private entities. And this can be done independently in each region, without having a single central contractor.
EU countries privatized their postal services decades ago, because governments are not allowed to compete with private entities in the market (unless explicitly allowed by EU-wide laws). And because the idea felt good, the same privatization extended to territories outside the EU, such as Greenland.
> 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 helping poor people.
> Why does a hill billy who insists on living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon deserve a subsidy?
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.
For one, Germany is a densely populated country smaller than the state of California. I think we can stop there?
There is really almost no comparison to the US in terms of rural areas anywhere in Europe.
Just split the US into 50 individual territories, if you think that being small is a benefit in service provision.
> There is really almost no comparison to the US in terms of rural areas anywhere in Europe.
Why do rural people deserve subsidies by virtue of living in the sticks?
What were the benefits to germany?
Lower prices, bigger volume in the market. And the privatised Deutsche Post (/ DHL) is now a world beating logistics company that makes plenty of profit, instead of subsidies and bleeding red ink all over.
However Germany still has plenty of government interference in snail mail, like a universal service mandate (or a sector specific minimum wage).
Denmark dropped that requirement, and Danish society hasn't collapsed so far.
Post is a natural monopoly, at a national scale. It is much more efficient to have a single centralized service doing all mail delivery than several competing services doing the same.
It isn't completely non-rivalrous, but the marginal cost of delivering a parcel diminishes as the number of parcels delivered in an area goes up.
> Post is a natural monopoly, at a national scale.
It evidently is not. There's multiple providers.
If the USPS were fully privatized without strict government subsidies or mandates, rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges or lose service entirely.
Once again… the United States is very large.
> [...] rural and remote Americans would likely face exorbitant delivery surcharges [...]
Surfacing the cost of service provision to end users is generally a good tool to align incentives.
(Use welfare systems to give money to poor people. But don't worry about giving rich people support just because they are old or live in the sticks.)
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> The USPS is a no-brainer public service and the only reason there is any question of its value is due to the severely broken, dysfunctional, corrupt
electorate.
Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there.
Once there member choices are shaped by the people who contact and persuade them.
If the USPS is poorly funded or managed, it’s because US electorate either wanted that, or was inattentive about the relevant funding and management and cares more about other things.
And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want.
Most Americans also prefer to blame political folk devils to for the failures instead, and seem to be more happy with that than personal and community discipline that would be necessary to engage responsibly, though, so the system is arguably working to reflect people’s revealed preferences already.
EDIT: I should probably add that it’s not obvious to me that it’s poorly managed. I’ve enjoyed decades of adequate-to-impressive service via USPS over a variety of locations.
"And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want."
I hate this. There is plenty of research showing that the opinion of the broader electorate has almost no influence on most policies. Only lobbyists and donors count.
Elections still have consequences, right? I’d think the fallout between fall of 2024 and now illustrates that. And that was the choice of the electorate (unless someone can demonstrate results were tampered with). So voter choices count.
There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters.
Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most officeholders try to keep their promises:
https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promi...
I agree lobbyists have influence. What is a lobbyist and why aren’t more people lobbying?
Donors also have influence, and yet the electorate has every opportunity to determine who donors must influence every election. Why would they choose someone who is only beholden to donors?
This argument assumes that Congress does what the electorate wants.
In a system where money in politics is unlimited (US v. Citizens United), elections consist of a first past the post two-party system, the president is not elected by popular vote, investigative media has been gutted and consolidated into oligarchal ownership, and proportional representation doesn’t exist (see: Washington DC residents have no representation, senators per Californian versus senators per Wyoming resident, gerrymandered districts) I don’t think we can blame the electorate for Congress not doing things that the people want.
Money distorts the system in some ways and I agree that’s a problem that could use systemic mitigation (farther back than Citizen’s United probably, Buckley vs Valeo is arguably the deeper roots).
But ultimately, money doesn’t remove the fundamental electoral mechanisms (yet) or opportunity for volunteer direct lobbying. It primarily distorts to the degree that it can be used to buy the focus of the electorate and to the degree it can be used to buy other people’s lobbying time.
People could spend their time managing their own political /public policy focus and volunteer lobbying instead of any other leisure activities. I’ve done it and I know others who do. Most Americans don’t, and that’s a revealed preference. Other leisure activities are more important.
The process of lobbying Congress involves physically showing up to the congressional offices in Washington DC, meeting with congressional staff, and often submitting draft legislation, which essentially requires a law degree to have the technical ability to write something of that sort.
Walmart is the largest private employer in America and they are have the most employees in America who receive SNAP benefits due to their lower income status.
I think we can’t create the step-by-step plan and budget for someone who works at Walmart as a cashier for how they’ll engage in the lobbying system. It’s just not possible.
Sure, there’s a lot of free things you can do to be an activist and make your voice heard, but it’s not at the same amplitude.
We can’t blame apathy and leisure when so many people don’t even have the budget for most forms of leisure.
You’re correct that time is the fundamental challenge. It’s also really what the money is always a proxy for at some level.
Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they represent, most have multiple. Most people don’t use them for the same reason they outsource their understanding of current events to Fox News or Rogan & guests. Some people do contact offices by phone or message, but fewer band together with others who care about a policy topic and leverage collective influence.
Sure it’s hard and time consuming. I’m not speaking from a position of full ability or particular privilege (though I have enough time to post on HN). But it’s also a bit like the old saw about meditation — 10 minutes a day, and if you’re too busy, 20 minutes. The activities themselves don’t always produce immediate leverage but once they lock in the return is powerful.
I get where you’re coming from, truly. I do also wish people were more politically engaged. But I just can’t go that far toward victim blaming, especially when so many forces work against people doing exactly what you suggested they do.
Just look at how Occupy Wall Street was broken up and twisted into irrelevancy by our media. It was a nonpartisan movement that corporate influence successfully split off into the two warring sides so that critical mass could never be achieved.
Any issue that is perfectly partisan never gets resolved, and the oligarchs know exactly how to turn most issues in that direction.
My prediction is that the data center and AI backlash could work exactly the same way if resistance grows too strong.
Anyway, perhaps I’m too far off-topic now.
yawn the old blame the victim. Get lost kid.
When the electorate is literally the mechanism by which officeholders are selected, how is the electorate not responsible?
This is not the same situation as someone who is the victim of a violent crime they didn’t volunteer for, choosing language that creates that confusion won’t change the reality that officeholders are chosen by the electorate.
Why not both? Yes, there are systemic issues in the US. But 70% of the US either voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all in 2024.
(Let me pause to pre-empt any bothsideism by saying that I think that’s silly and I doubt you’ll change my mind on that, but you can try)
Continuing on - liberals tend to point at systemic issues, but personal responsibility is a thing too. I’m a bit tired of the “education this, social media that” arguments. I grew up in rural Texas, one of the most conservative, fundamentalist, and poorly educated states in the US. By the time I was 14 I rejected the then nascent Fox-style fascism and bigotry I was surrounded by at home and church, because I actually bothered to seek out information on the internet and hear the other side even when it was uncomfortable or felt morally repugnant to me
I don’t say this to congratulate myself (or maybe I do, deep down). I try to stay humble and I feel that I succeed in that to the extent that I have often had self esteem issues. I genuinely have tried to see the other side. Everyone in my family is conservative. It would make my life easier if I didn't have the cognitive dissonance of caring about them while at the same time frankly reckoning with the fact that I consider them weak and stupid people that I would never associate with if we didn't have history. It feels mean and bad to say that out loud, but no matter how much I try to repress it, it's the way I feel. I really don't want to be someone that lets politics come in the way of relationships, but at some point it's a matter of personal values
So after 2024, I have to say, what the hell is wrong with the people in this country? Why is everyone so stupid, selfish and easily misled? There are so many legitimately interesting and inherently difficult problems to be solved with politics, and so far in my 30 years I’ve only seen conservatives blowing the United State’s huge lead by clogging up all of the political bandwidth of the entire country with barefaced bigotry. I’m so tired of it. 2024 was a breaking point for me. I don’t know how I can identify with or be proud of this country.
Happy 250th y’all
>Why is everyone so stupid, selfish and easily misled?
The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on conditioning them to be that way
Doesn't USPS also play a key role in a lot of other services?
* ID verification
* Vacant home notifications
* Registered mail
I have a hard time seeing a private company scrupulously handling these operations when the incentives to manipulate them could be very large.
I still think the USPS banking idea would be a really great one.
Easier profit than a regular bank because the “branches” already have to exist, closes banking gaps for underserved populations, perhaps some other benefits I haven’t even considered.
It shouldn't be done for-profit, it should be equivalent to a credit union open to all.
Also voting.
If you privatize the post office, then either mail-in voting stops completely, or else a private company can control which mail-in ballots get delivered, and which ones don't.
Yes, it also had a mandate to deliver mail. So people living in the middle of nowhere New Mexico can do something like run a small business through delivery (this was on the radio the last time this nonsense was floated). It's actually kind of beautiful, something that I can't imagine would work with a privately owned system.
The beautiful thing is a society deeming universal (gasp!) access to mail to be important.
The ugly part is profit driven mindset, and a “you live in an unprofitable area to mail to, sorry” obvious outcome
They'd end up charging you the amount of money you'd make sending the package, that's how all these forms of rentierism work: Uber, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, etc. Private taxes they want to force onto people.
Must fight it at any opportunity. I can't imagine the economic value something like USPS brings to the country, likely trillions of trillions over it's lifespan. Something the corpos would never admit.
And general delivery*, media mail**, passports, money orders, stamps, and collectables. Furthermore, nation-state post offices should provide free basic banking services to everyone to eliminate unbanked status.
* Delivery to a post office for an individual without a delivery address
** Low cost media shipping excluding comic books, games, and magazines containing advertisements
The postal service was in the constitution from the beginning - Washington signed it. But the wording is a bit weird - obviously there's supposed to be a postal service but now with how bad tings have become, who knows.
Huh, where's the postal service in the constitution?
As far as I can tell your constitution allows the federal level to regulate postal services, but it does not require the establishment of government snail mail.
"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 study regarding a 'more modern' constitution: the German (de facto) constitution is only around 80 years old.
Interestingly, both the US and German constitution were written explicitly to limit the power of the federal level. But in both systems the federal level grabbed more and more power as time went on. (Partially because that's also popular with the voters.)
> But no roads?
What's so confusing about that? Presumably the constitution assumes that normal roads are for the more local layers of government to deal with.
I interpret 'shall have power' to mean 'if they want to, they can do it'. Doesn't mean they have. Eg they have the power to levy tariffs on foreign trade, but the constitution is perfectly happy with free trade, too.
That's quite a non sequitur there. The wording is weird, so we should abandon the entire constitution?
Not so fast, comrade. Not so fast. You've got a lot of work ahead of you to fill in the gaps in your logic here, before any of us are going to agree with your conclusion.
A Soviet joke goes like this: "Daddy, daddy, they've said on the radio that vodka price goes up next month! Does it mean that you won't drink as much anymore?" — "No, son, it means that you won't eat as much no more".
So. The new private owner(s) will try to increase their profit. Increasing the efficiency of the processes already in place while providing the same services with the same coverage/quality/etc. at the same prices is indeed one way to increase the profit... but it's one of the hardest ways. Hiking up the prices and discontinuing services with smallest margins is a much simpler, easier, and even more effort-efficient way so this is what's going to happen first.
It means prices will go up and service/quality will go down. I already consider the service sort of at a base state. If it gets any worse, it will just go under. Which is what they want.
It's already a (public) corporation. You can send mail through the non-profit, old postal service. You have to measure the postage yourself and put it in the slot called non-domestic mail.
That the US has failed as a country?
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 inevitable enshitififaction and something that barely works good enough? Privatize it.
Neoliberalism and libertarianism utopian bullshit ruin everything.
It's a casualty of political corruption, both moral in terms of Party first politics and run-of-the-mill crony capitalism. That's what it means.
The consequences are far reaching for many existing industries. It may never be unraveled once initiated. It will give rise to more concentrated wealth and power. This is by design.
And the current situation, having a billionaire running the country, is fully intentional by a major part of the society.
Want to get rid of corruption? - Vote a representative of the source of that corruption (aka billionaires) into power... sorry, WHAT?
Billionaire is keen to make billionaire-friendly politics. A surprising headline? Apparently.
>much of what USPS does is unprofitable
The same could be said about many organizations within companies if you don't give them a proper budget. Once you start actually caring about being profitable it turns out that you can find how to do things in a way that is less wasteful. Cost acts as an incentive to reduce waste and if you remove it then there is no force to combat waste or unsustainable practices.
>It’s not that private entities won’t deliver postal service; it’s that they quite literally can’t.
If you paid someone $10,000 to deliver a letter to somewhere in the country I'm sure they could find a way to bring it there. It is not impossible.
Yeah, of course they can/could, it's just that it does not make sense from an economic point of view. Which directly circles back to the beginning "USPS is not profitable".
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