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Comment by callmeal | Hacker News Reader

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The simplest argument against government run services is that eventually, the people you don't like will be in charge of them

The simplest counterpoint to this is that government allows accountability.

You will have those same people you don’t like running private enterprise, but CEOs have much longer terms than postmasters general.

I disagree that government allows accountability, exhibit one: TSA.

As a matter of fact, I cannot think of one organization in the country that has less accountability than the Federal Government

You can usually switch to a different company when you're not happy with the work they do, it's much harder to switch to a different state.

As long as you have term limits, you don’t have to move states/countries to get different leaders, you vote.

Voting is not a good way to get what you want. Your vote will have essentially no impact on the outcome of the election.

My choice to go with this provider or that one has 100% of an impact on me. There is no creative destruction going on with the USPS.

>Voting is not a good way to get what you want. Your vote will have essentially no impact on the outcome of the election.

Voting is the most minimal way to participate democratically. Much more meaningful are advocating for your needs to elected representatives, speaking out publicly, and organizing/attending demonstrations.

But if you want to give up democracy to live under a dictatorship, certainly don't pretend that you actually speak for anyone other than yourself.

> But if you want to give up democracy to live under a dictatorship, certainly don't pretend that you actually speak for anyone other than yourself.

Please don't do the Reddit thing. The argument wasn't "we need dictatorship", it was "it's easier to switch commercial providers than governments if you're unhappy".

Not all commercial providers are easy to switch. I can't easily switch the company that provides power to my condo. For people with natural gas it's usually not easy to switch that either. If I don't like the property management company my HOA uses it isn't something I can switch on my own. Tonnes of places across the US don't have options for switching high speed internet providers. Switching any of the services I mentioned could require moving, sometimes a considerable distance, for plenty of people.

>I can't easily switch the company that provides power to my condo.

This is because they have a government protected monopoly. Cities like Chicago and Baltimore and NYC used to have dozens of competing utilities before the government began granting charters that gave one firm an exclusive right to provide power, gas, or oil.

Accountability to whom? The NSA is still illegally snooping on you and I, killer-cops go unpunished, and the social justice system is biased against black men, but supposedly there is accountability?

The difference here is that it's not profitable for UPS to piss off its customer base. A CEO of a privatised postal company acting in his own rational self interest would produce far different results than Donald Trump acting in his own rational self interest.

And even if the CEO didn't produce good results, I could mail my letter using another firm. With USPS, this is not possible. They have a legally protected monopoly on the delivery of letters. No one else can do it.

Every delivery service has horror stories. I’ve experienced bad deliveries with all of them. Turns out, there are still humans working at all of them.

Voting is accountability. You’ll have to find another time to discuss every other thing that’s wrong with our government, because right now we’re talking about a service being purposefully degraded in efforts to reduce the one of the only means we have for holding government accountable: voting.

Theirs 2 sides to every story. The Democrats and the press are doing there best to whip up a fear frenzy over a strong flu wave that's really only killing people who were already sick. If that wasn't happening no one would give a shit about the USPS and what's happening for the better there, in my opinion.

If we're disregarding "congress" and "administration", I'm not sure how you propose this is a "Republican" problem at all. Republicans where? Republican... citizens? Republican postal workers? Which Republicans have caused USPS to has a history of financial issues?

Just from this graph, it looks like since 1960, the only time they ran a surplus was 1994 - 2004: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/USPS_Sur...

>Which Republicans have caused USPS to has a history of financial issues?

The ones who in 2006 forced the USPS to pre-fund their retirement obligations.

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...

>>Unlike any other public or private entity, under a 2006 law, the U.S. Postal Service must pre-fund retiree health benefits. We must pay today for benefits that will not be paid out until some future date. Other federal agencies and most private sector companies use a “pay-as-you-go” system, by which the entity pays premiums as they are billed. Shifting to such a system would equate to an average of $5.65 billion in additional cash flow per year through 2016, and save the Postal Service an estimated $50 billion over the next ten years. With the announcement of our Action Plan in March, we began laying the foundation for change, requesting that Congress restructure this obligation. >> >>The pre-funding requirement, as it currently stands, contributes significantly to postal losses. Under current law, the Postal Service must follow a mandated pre-funding schedule of $5.5 billion to $5.8 billion per year through 2016.

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