What does privatization of the US Postal Service mean?

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.

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.

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.

(And everything you explain could also be accomplished by state-run services, no need to involve the federal level.)

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

It evidently is not. There's multiple providers.

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.)

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?

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.

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.

(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

Strawman. You might have the belief that it’s hard to get right, but that seems based on the American news sources you are consuming from your spit in the world. In reality, there are very little issues with this.

The Constitution is mostly fine and has carried your (?) country for 250 years. It is mostly fine because it is mostly interpreted in an originalist way, i.e. as a document meant to function as the underpinning of a society where all men are equal and endowed with unalienable rights by God. That last bit - God - is as important for those who believe in a god as it is for those who don't because it means those rights are not granted by government and as such can not be taken away.

The wording of a constitution is one thing, the interpretation thereof a wholly different one. Read the constitution of the Soviet Union and you get the impression that there was a state where people really were able to live life to the fullest, helped and protected by the government. Compare it to how life actually looked in that state and you'll get the impression that you surely must have read the wrong document.

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.

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.

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.