Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting
vice.com
vice.com
It’s gotta be regional, because I’ve heard stories like yours about all of the carriers. Problem is there doesn’t seem to be a way for a mere mortal to effect change if your local couriers all suck.
Edit: Besides, the USPS is almost effectively a privatized organization, with their requirement to operate within a balanced budget.
It's unclear that any organization, public or private, can remain financially solvent under such constraints.
Is there any particular reason a law couldn’t be passed that just abolished the monopoly, giving private enterprise a try, but leaves everything else unchanged? (Let’s fix the stupid pension mandate while we’re at it)
It's a Constitutionally-required service the government must provide. The risk of privatizing it may very well be too high to justify the dollar savings.
For example, the post has a mandate to deliver successfully (somehow) to every location people live in the country. What will private enterprise do if that's not revenue-positive?
It's a short-lived government that fails to do so, however.
Apologies for invoking Godwin's law, but Germany is another example of a country where state-owned postal services tend to be correlated with regime change. There was all sorts of drama starting around 1900 when the central government started bringing independent post offices from Kingdoms like Bavaria and Württemberg into the fold. Probably the most contentious of these takeovers was the Danzig Post Office. Many mailmen were tortured and eventually executed. Things have been much more stable in the decades since Germany privatized their postal system.
But what if we replaced it with the following: "an extremely politicized government can't run services well".
Is that a controversial statement? And if it isn't, doesn't that suggest that you don't want an extremely polarized/politicized government running extremely critical infrastructure?
> The private corporations will quickly increase prices while reducing services.
This is fairly simplistic, as we know that not to be the case for the vast majority of private services we use today. Yes, there exists conditions where this is true (monopolies), but it's true less often than the above statement that "politicized government can't run services well".
So if you want to know why they're having monetary problems, look no further.
>"an extremely politicized government can't run services well"
The Republicans normally make this a truism by sabotaging government programs. With the exception of the military, everything else gets squeezed and forced to justify their budget requests, but hardly anyone ever says "you want to raise the DoD budget by $100 billion? HOW ARE WE GONNA PAY FOR THAT?" Notice how if you propose $75 billion for tuition free college, GOP spokespeople are all over the media raising questions about funding mechanisms.
The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like a for profit business" concerns.
Yes, but you have to contend with the reality that you are participating in the same government as they are. It's like constantly insisting on sharing a pool with a kid that constantly insists on peeing in it, with no real way to kick that kid out. It's a byproduct of the polity in which we are participating, and as long as a democratically elected government consists of people who don't agree with you (read: polarized / corrupt), the services they run will have problems, as we are seeing.
> The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like a for profit business" concerns.
Just because the USPS has been reliable in the past, doesn't mean that it's structurally set up to be reliable forever. It could also just mean that we weren't as polarized about how the USPS should function in the past, and we are now. As long as that continues to be the case, the USPS will be a sub-optimal agency. In contrast, how many goods & services provided by the private sector have this problem? If a corporation is self-sabotaging, it will die, and be replaced by another corporation. That doesn't appear to be the case with a polarized government.
Also, the allergic reaction to privatization / profits strikes me as just as (if not more) reactionary than the right-wing allergic reaction to public services. The private sector is involved in reliably providing us with critical goods & services like food, clothing, furniture, housing (in markets without onerous zoning), transportation, information technology, e-mail, cloud computing, electronics, etc etc etc. All of those things gotten cheaper over time (even relative to inflation), have seen an increase in investment over time, and an increase in quality over time. The profit motive is just the incentive for people to provide goods & services for others, as efficiently as possible. It's not a silver bullet, as monopolies can lead to rent seeking, but to suggest that the private sector is always and unquestionably "bad" is not a serious opinion worth engaging with. Importantly, the public sector is also not a silver bullet, as we are seeing.
Also, privatized postal services aren't novel either. Singapore's postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company. The UK's postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company. Germany's postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company. Japan's postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company.
Your issue is that you participate in a government where your fellow citizens are voting to sabotage the public services. From where I sit, the private sector strikes me as strictly better than a self-sabotaging public sector that's governed by Republican politicians every 4-8 years. Either we continue to swim in a pee-filled pool, or we figure out another swimming arrangement.
I'm asking this seriously. I'm just trying to understand what problems you believe privatization will fix.
And privatization isn’t some new scary boogeyman, it’s been implemented in a handful of healthy and prosperous nations (Germany, Japan, Singapore, the UK).
> Which of your problems cannot be fixed by changes to the current system?
I’d ask you how you’d even go about “changing the system” when you’re participating in that system with people that violently disagree with you. This is the logical endpoint of “democratic planning”, where people that disagree with you vote for a self-sabotaging system. Nobody wins, everyone is equally unhappy.
> I’d ask you how you’d even go about “changing the system” when you’re participating in that system with people that violently disagree with you.
What does this statement even mean? Literally every law passed, ever action taken by the government, etc. changes the current system. You're acting like "changing the system" is impossible when it's clearly not. Hell, _privatization_ is even a "change of the system". Just like partial privatization is. Just like changes the the postal system are.
Please help me understand your thinking.
For starters, unlike what we’re seeing today, mail-in ballots would be processed without issue because there isn’t a political incentive to hobble it. As long as there is a market need to reliably deliver ballots, privatized carriers will process them.
> Would delivery costs go down? Why?
They certainly could. The private sector is often better at allocating resources than the public sector, because of the superior efficiency of competition and the pricing system as compared to central planning.
I can give you a couple concrete examples.
NASA's planned SLS moon mission is a bit of a disaster — way over budget and way behind schedule. Because the boosters aren't reusable, each launch is expected to cost $1B (with a B) dollars — EACH launch! Meanwhile SpaceX's target cost-per-launch is $50M.
In Washington DC, the average government school spending per student is $31,280. The average private school tuition in DC is $23,959.
Finally, privatization would allow for greater funding (through greater investment). Today, the funding of USPS is limited by the political process.
> Literally every law passed, every action taken by the government, etc changes the current system
That’s not what I mean by “changing the system”. What I’m saying is that as long as the postal service is tightly coupled to the political process by being “government run”, and the government in question is polarized as to whether it should even exist, then it will produce sub-par outcomes relative to its private counterparts. There is literally no law you can pass to change this save for changing who is allowed to vote/participate in the government, or by decreasing a public agency’s democratic accountability. Those all require Constitutional changes (“changes to the system”) which are almost impossible in the current climate.
Universal service has a cost and like roads, those costs may not be economical everywhere but none the less necessary (eg clean water, electricity, education, etc for all Americans regardless of which town they live in)
This is conjecture, at best. If there’s a market need for something, it will be met at the fair market value for that thing — provided there are no exogenic barriers like regulation or endogenic barriers like monopolies/cartels.
At best, you can probably make the case that rural areas will no longer receive subsidized mail service, but it’s worth asking ourselves if that’s even a desirable goal. And even if it is, it’s worth considering if nationalization is the best way to achieve subsidized rural delivery, or if direct subsidy or a UBI is the better way to achieve that, or perhaps even regulating the private carriers just like for eg food quality is regulated by the FDA.
I’ll also add that the rural population is overwhelmingly the set of people who are aggressively voting for privatization.
The US has "kicked out" two or three "kids" over its history.
It'll be interesting to see where the Republican party's strategy goes in the near future.
Tying our goods & services to that strikes me as an odd basis for a system of government, and altogether discounting privatization as a solution to this strikes me as equally dogmatic as those that say blindly regurgitate “government can’t run services”.
A good solution is probably a redundant solution, but pushing the solution too far towards only government versus privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect.
Taking that generalization and concretizing it to the topic of a post office, there are several alternatives in the private sector already to USPS. but they don't serve the margins of the country like USPS does as per its constitutional mandate.
You hit the nail on the head: you need both public and private.
I will push back on the idea that “privatization likely decreases the service that underserved populations can expect”, because that’s just not true for the other goods and services that rural people require (food, clothing, etc). If there’s a market need for something, it will be met at the fair market value for that thing — provided there are no exogenic barriers like regulation or endogenic barriers like monopolies/cartels.
At best, you can probably make the case that rural areas will no longer receive subsidized service, but it’s worth asking ourselves if that’s even a desirable goal. And even if it is, it’s worth considering if nationalization is the best way to achieve subsidized rural delivery, or if direct subsidy or a UBI is the better way to achieve that, or perhaps even regulating the private carriers just like for eg food quality is regulated by the FDA. I’ll also add that the rural population is overwhelmingly the set of people who are aggressively voting for the kids peeing in the pool.
> Taking that generalization and concretizing it to the topic of a post office, there are several alternatives in the private sector already to USPS
Unfortunately this is not true. The USPS has a legislated monopoly on first class paper mail. UPS/FedEx/DHL/Amazon couldn’t send mail to a mailbox if they wanted to. Crucially, this means that mail-in ballots cannot be delivered by anyone except for the agency that a certain political party is trying to kneecap to suppress those very ballots — even if there is a market need for reliable ballot delivery.
One could also modify the system of government, moving away from executive appointees and towards committee appointments and a professional civil service.
And setting aside appointments, you also have politicized budget appropriations, i.e. how can you be certain that the government will adequately fund an agency if there exists a large enough contingent devoted to gutting it?
Either you're suggesting creating an agency whose appointments have no accountability from the legislature, or whose budget has no accountability from the legislature. If that's not what you're suggesting, then the core problem is not the system of government itself, it's the polity, the people who are actually voting for that government. You can't have an effective government if half the governed don't want to be a part of that government with you.
It is a simple view that summarizes really well what happens when public services are privatized. There is more nuance to it, but the main effects are "de-investment", "increase in price", "reduction of service".
> "politicized government can't run services well".
I understand your statement as "a polarizing/corrupt government" as I guess that all governments are politicized, it is in their job title.
It's simplistic because "increase in price" and "reduction of service" have not been observed to happen in private sector services today. If you look at the vast majority of goods & services across the board, prices have decreased over time, and service has improved dramatically. This is because the pricing system and competition act as a downward pressure on price and an upward pressure on service quality. This is obviously not always the case (eg. monopolies), but it is the case for the vast majority of goods & services.
Food, clothing, transportation, information technology, electronics, appliances — have all gotten cheaper over time (even relative to inflation), have seen an increase in investment over time, and an increase in quality over time.
Another concrete example: NASA's planned SLS moon mission is a bit of a disaster — way over budget and way behind schedule. Because the boosters aren't reusable, each launch is expected to cost $1B (with a B) dollars — EACH launch! Meanwhile SpaceX's target cost-per-launch is $50M. Central planning almost never yields the optimum allocation of resources (there are certainly exceptions), whereas the decentralized pricing system almost always does (there are certainly exceptions).
While it's simplistic to say that "government doesn't run services well", it's just as simplistic to suggest that "privatization results in price increases and service decreases".
> I understand your statement as "a polarizing/corrupt government" as I guess that all governments are politicized, it is in their job title.
Correct, which suggests that "government can't run services well" will always be true, for as long as governments are polarized/corrupt. Democracy doesn't yield the best results when you're participating in that democracy with people who violently disagree with you. Governments can be good at running things if everyone agrees on how it should be run, and even then there's no guarantee because central planning usually doesn't yield optimum resource allocation, due to the economic calculation problem.
Sorry for bringing something political in nature to HN. Before this I would never think of it. But all tech progress relies on a sound democracy.