Sometimes it's okay to recognize something is a social good. Large swathes of the rural population of the US would be underserved/overcharged (in regards to current levels) for similar levels of service.
The second part of your post is a fine argument and I'm not complaining about that, but "it's okay to recognize something is a social good" is not fine. It is likely everybody in this thread thinks a cheap, great logistic system is desirable. No impugning of motives, thank you very much.
This is not the case in the US where millions of people don't have convenient access to food.
While there are no doubt significant benefits for the U.S. to attain looking at models for how other countries handle the distributive logistics of various industries, I would argue that the vastly different population densities of the two nations should be assumed to be material, unless and until robust arguments with strong evidence show otherwise.
0.7 percent of the population isn't too bad.
There are food stamps and government grants to private charities charities. And there people who donate millions of hours to food distribution to the poor and vulnerable.
Private businesses do not handle food distribution just fine.
The guy I responded to later advocated for privatization of roads.
I'm perfectly fine with impugning the motives of a person who has arrived at that being a sane policy decision. Before that? I'm perfectly fine with impugning the motives of a person who believes it's okay to privatize the means of voting for an entire state.
I don't know about Australia, but in the US food is propped up by massive taxpayer subsidy and relies on an undocumented immigrant workforce paid low wages with no recourse against employer abuse.
In addition to the subsidies, they also have tariffs on many foods. Those definitely don't lower food prices.
Also, even if we accept that the government doing mail delivery is good, why does it need to be a federal agency? Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
But I guess you don't have subsidiarity in the US? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
If each state did postal service piecemeal you'd have all sorts of nightmare state-specific pricing, size regulations, delivery schedules, etc. Nobody would benefit from that. Each state would also have to bargain individually with foreign nations about international shipping.
To an extent, companies would charge higher prices for performing services that cost more.
> If each state did postal service piecemeal you'd have all sorts of nightmare state-specific pricing, size regulations, delivery schedules, etc. Nobody would benefit from that. Each state would also have to bargain individually with foreign nations about international shipping.
Why? They could still subscribe to common standards. Just like different paper mills still produce standard sized paper.
Similar for international shipping. Though individual bargaining might be an advantage, too.
Out of interest what’s your opinion on roads? City dwellers almost certainly subsidise the construction of roads they may never need to use, and the US doesn’t pull toll gates on their roads to makes sure they’re charging higher prices for services that cost more.
Any American (or indeed anyone in the US) can use any road for free, as much as they want, for only the cost of their taxes. Assuming they even paid any.
Especially with modern technology for collecting tolls, privatised roads are more feasible than ever.
In practice, I would expect roads to be financed by a mixture of pay-for-use and local businesses.
Even without privatized roads, it can be useful to charge road users. Here in Singapore we have Electronic Road Pricing in some parts of the city to keep congestion down. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Road_Pricing
It works very well. Jams are almost unheard of.
London has a watered down copy of our system.
So see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_canal_s...
But also have a look specifically at roads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnpike_trust
Without government power forcing the sale of land none of those early railroads would have been built.
The same thing applies to canal building in the 18th century. Government authority was used to force landowners to allow canals to be built.
Again with turnpike trusts, acts of parliament were required to establish each one, and they were generally financed by community bonds.
There has never been a history of private entities building a large, road or rail network through land owned by many different private owners without using the power of government to force the landowners to cooperate.
But private suppliers plus eminent domain is still a far cry from nationalized roads.
What's the mechanism in place to prevent the private road owner from charging far more than the maintenance costs of the road? The government steps in confiscates more private land to build additional less efficient routes that they refuse to sell to existing management companies to allow for some amount of competition? The government creates regulatory bodies to oversee the private road management companies and ensure they don't charge too much? The government regularly accepts bids from different companies to handle management, and somehow manages to keep this bidding process corruption free, there are no problems from regularly handing off control to different companies, and the transaction costs for switching companies don't overwhelm the savings?
The free market depends on competition to work, but with roads built through eminent domain, competition must be artificially engineered. At some point direct government ownership is the most efficient solution.
Freedom of people to move their place of residence and business, and long term contracts.
Basically people don't move house willy-nilly, but when they move house they can take considerations like roads and railroads etc into account. That's what they do today, too.
Long term contracts assure that your decision will be valid for as long as you like to negotiate.
No need for all the regulation you envision here.
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However, I do agree to an extent: private companies are not a panacea by themselves. As you can see with the sorry state of eg American banking (especially historically when branch banking was banned) or in their healthcare system or what I hear about residential internet access.
What is more important is genuine competition.
Alas, adding lots and lots of layers of regulation seldom works. You just get regulatory capture instead.
In that case, you might make an argument that outright government ownership doesn't look too bad in comparison. Especially if you can have very local levels of government be responsible. Eg municipal waterworks seem to work reasonably well around the world. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewer_Socialism
What often works better is deliberately decreasing barriers to entry. Be that from foreign competition, local upstarts, or established firms branching out into other industries. (Eg Walmart tried to allow people to open bank accounts. You can guess at the lobbying storm from incumbents that caused.)
Another good measure, but extremely unpopular in practice is to make sure your regulations are as simple as possible. For example, when you have decided to privatize some government agency, say like USPS or Amtrak, you should remove all the debts from its balance sheet and then sell it strictly to the highest bidder.
In practice, that never happens. In practice, there will be a beauty contest with lots of complicated rules (eg about preserving jobs etc). Those rules give the adjudicating officials lots of leeway to decide, and thus power.
Invariably, the buyer will later on renege on their promises.
That's much harder if you just hold an auction in terms of cold, hard cash.
(I'm parroting the suggestions of 'Just Get Out of the Way' https://www.bookdepository.com/Just-Get-Out-Way-Robert-E-And... here. The wisdom of removal of debt from the balance sheet before selling wasn't obvious to me for a while: the idea is that any dollar of debt left on the balance sheet would decrease the sales price by roughly a dollar, but if the newly privatized company goes belly up, it would be politically impossible to avoid a bailout of the debt that existed before the privatization.
In practice we'd expect the new owner to add debt back on the balance sheet shortly after the sale. But that new debt will be politically much less charged.)
Locations aren't fungible and the kinds of long term population movements your taking about take decades. People, including those running the companies that manage the roads are terrible at working on those kinds of time scales.
I can guarantee you, that you would end up with companies extracting the maximum possible rent today without worrying about the effect on the long term population effects of the area. The CEO of roadco isn't going to care that raising the road tolls will depopulate a community in 30 years.
I don't want to live in a world where the health of a community depends on the long term thinking of an unelected private corporation, where the only recourse I have is to uproot my family and move somewhere else.
>What often works better is deliberately decreasing barriers to entry.
That's the problem with roads. The barriers to entry are far too high to allow new competitors to easily enter a market, and the only way to make them low enough to foster serious competition requires allowing private companies to seize even more private property.
>Long term contracts assure that your decision will be valid for as long as you like to negotiate.
There's no reason for a company with a monopoly on the shortest route between 2 desirable places to enter into a long term contract. Call up Comcast and tell them you want to pay $60 a month for the next 10 years. They'd laugh at you because they have no reason to negotiate with individuals. Even if it was possible, you'd need to anticipate which routes you'd take and where in town you'd like to work for the next x years, so that you could negotiate with dozens of different road management companies.
Even if you're talking about long term group rates where a municipality negotiates with the management company, who's going to hold a company to the contract. They'll do what every government contractor today does and lowball the estimate. Then when they say they have to raise prices, if you try to hold them to it, they'll just end up in bankruptcy court.
What's to stop regional and even national monopolies from forming who own all the roads in an area? Barrier to entry is extremely high, so there's no natural force to prevent this?
Seriously I used to be a libertarian bordering on ancap, I know all these arguments, and I know the lure of having a single unified ideological framework that solves all problems. The free market, and the non-aggression principal ain't it. There are too many places where the free market ends up in a local optimum.
This is how a lot of subsidies work in the US. City-dwellers subsidize rural communities.
> you think USPS is more efficient than a private sector alternative would be?
Likely any cost savings non-rural people would see is at the cost of pensions, employee benefits, or other potential stones-to-be-bled. If USPS is privatized, these things will be strangled to death.
> Wouldn't this more logically be something for the states to do?
No, I don't think so. This is just a backdoor to make privatization easier: whenever some state either mismanages their postal service or simply can't keep it afloat, we'll be at the cutting block again. Furthermore, there's obvious potential efficiencies an interstate mail network has compared to a state-level mail network. The "decentralization" here just necessitates more communication overhead, potentially different laws requiring re-sorting, and a bunch of other potential headaches.
OK. Seems a bit inefficient and arbitrary.
I can sort-of get behind transfers from rich people to poor people. That's fine. But why subsidies people for being hillbillies?
> Likely any cost savings non-rural people would see is at the cost of pensions, employee benefits, or other potential stones-to-be-bled. If USPS is privatized, these things will be strangled to death.
Sounds like a good thing?
> No, I don't think so. This is just a backdoor to make privatization easier:
Yes, that's a benefit.
> Furthermore, there's obvious potential efficiencies an interstate mail network has compared to a state-level mail network.
You would obviously allow the state level agencies to compete out-of-state.
Ahh, okay. Anything to save you a cent regardless of the immiseration it spreads. Good luck.
But why punish people for living in areas that are easier to service by mail? (Ie why make them cross subsidize the hill billies?)
You need to sit down and actually think about the policy results of what you're advocating for because you seem entirely confused.
In general the European policies are far from perfect, but they show that the American arguments for nationalised mail are bogus.
> The message right before this you stated that you're perfectly fine with privatizing pensions, cutting union contracts, etc, but now you claim you care about not punishing people. Furthermore, you claim to be against wealth transfers upwards, but this privatization would do exactly that.
What makes you think so? I'm for a level playing field. Government employees should get the same options for pensions as the rest of the population. The best option to help workers is a vibrant job market. Unions mostly just protect the insiders, like union functionaries are just in general people who already have a job.
What makes you think USPS is inefficient? If it wasn’t for the ludicrous pension constraints applied to them of funding all pensions out to 2056 upfront, a requirement that no other federal agency or private company has. USPS would be returning almost a billion dollars of profit every year.
I would call that pretty good going for a public service.
(You could auction of the monopoly to see how much it is worth. Though in reality, you would be better off just to abolish it.)
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service#C...
The term to search for is "Private Express Statutes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes.
This article (titled "Universal Service and the Postal Monopoly: A Brief History") goes into more depth: https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/universal-se...
Cause it’s constitutionally mandated.
Edit: I just had a look. The clause only seems to talk about the power, not the obligation to run a postal service.
In fact, 'An early controversy was whether Congress had the power to actually build post roads and post offices, or merely designate which lands and roads were to be used for this purpose, [...]'.
As far as I can tell the constitution only gives congress the power to interfere in mail, it doesn't impose an obligation to do so.
> Section 8
> 1: The Congress shall have Power To [...] To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
Similar to how the same section gives Congress the right to borrow or to impose tariffs and excise duties, but I don't think anyone would construe that as an obligation to borrow or a ban on free trading.
I don't think there was any constitutional crisis when the national debt reached 0 during the Andrew Jackson administration?
So yeah, based on how cheap it is to send mail in the US, and the fact that USPS would be profitable venture if they weren’t screwed over by horrible laws (pension prefunding, etc.), the USPS is very efficient and shouldn’t be parceled out to states.