> 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.

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.

A privatised postal service could capture this as well to finance rural delivery.

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.

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.

Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination.

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.)

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.

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?

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 evidently is not. There's multiple providers.

> [...] 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.)

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?

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.

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