The USPS: The New Socialist Evil

The last week has seen the shrieking deficit drama queens fixate on an entirely new target: the United States Postal Service. It seems that the Post Office is in a bit of a bind, fiscally speaking. Due to the insanely rising costs of healthcare (and thus, retirement funds since old people get sick a lot more than young people), the USPS is close to missing a payment for its retired workers. Some have even suggested the service is close to complete default, and thus is in danger of being forced to shut down by winter. A variety of factors over the last twenty years has led to decreased revenues, most notably the rising use of email for personal correspondence, electronic bill paying and competition from private sector shipping companies like UPS and FedEx. The cost of postage has risen a number of times in just the last few years, but according to the Postmaster General, the rise in revenue has not kept pace with the rise in costs like healthcare and retirees.

And so the shrill cries for destruction begin to gain volume. The Post Office is outdated. It’s a waste of money during a debt crisis. It should make a profit and be self-sustaining, and if it can’t, it should be put out of its misery so that good, decent private sector companies can pick up its slack.

There’s one big problem with the arguments about the USPS, though. See, the USPS does one helluva good job. Oh, I know, we all have images of the lazy Post Office workers shuffling glacially from place to place, slowing up our day and generally looking like shiftless layabouts. We think of that one time we got a letter so dog-eared, it might well have made its way through a dog’s digestive tract before reaching us, or that time a letter was lost in the USPS void. Lost shipping and damaged goods are not the exclusive domain of state-run package delivery, however. That’s why the shippers sell insurance.

The ugly truth is that for all the bad rap the Post Office gets, they still manage to deliver millions of tiny little slips of paper to every house no matter how far into the ass end of nowhere that house is. Every day, packages get delivered to remote locations where paved roads are still a novelty. They do it for $.44 cents, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. We can argue about whether that’s a fair price or not – it’s likely too low considering the difficulties. Tell you what – call up UPS and see if they’ll deliver that tiny letter to your Grandmother in Possum Chase, BFE for less than a dollar on a Saturday. They MIGHT be willing to do it, but it sure as fuck won’t cost less than a dollar. Or get them to deliver to a Post Office box, anywhere. They won’t do it for that cheap, if they’ll do it at all. Why? That’s an easy one to answer – because it’s not profitable.

The government, for better or worse, is the only entity in the position to do things that aren’t profitable. When those things are important to the common good, like a well-functioning Post Office is, you can’t expect the private sector to step in and take up the slack because that’s not in their DNA. The private sector functions to make profit. The public sector exists to provide a common good first, even if that good sometimes doesn’t balance the budget. It’s why for-profit healthcare is eroding the fabric of our economy. For-profit enterprises are built to make profit, not provide a common good. Another factor to consider in the private/public balance is that those private sector businesses like UPS and FedEx benefit greatly from the existence of the Post Office. They provide convenient retail locations that these businesses piggyback off of for drop locations, as well as well-positioned shipping hubs in airports around the country. UPS and FedEx wouldn’t exist without the Post Office.

Finally, the last thing to consider about shuttering the Post Office is the broader economy itself. As much as businesses use email and the telephone for communication, and electronic transfers for checks, there is still a staggering amount of business that requires the Post Office. Checks being mailed, bills being mailed, direct marketing, catalogs – while the Post Office may be in the process of BECOMING redundant, it ain’t there yet. Broadband penetration is stalled, especially in rural areas (again because it’s not profitable to take the pipes rural) so a total reliance on electronic communication is not possible. The difference in costs between USPS and what private sector firms would charge for the same service is sizable, and who would end up eating those costs? Private sector businesses that use the USPS now for cheap shipping.

We can haggle about what needs to change with the Post Office. But talk of shutting it down? That’s a shotgun blast to the economy’s face.

September 8, 2011 at 9:21 pm | Politics | 2 comments

2 responses to “The USPS: The New Socialist Evil”

  1. Gary Ballard, Author » The USPS Part Duh: The Netflix Paradigm says:
    September 12, 2011 at 8:32 pm

    […] had an add-on thought to my post from the other day about the United States Postal Service. While many of the “free-market solves all” types howl for the Post Office to be shut […]

    Reply
  2. Mark. Hoffman says:
    May 5, 2018 at 4:41 am

    Ever heard of Lysander Spooner and the American Mail Company? Love your books,but you might want to do a little historical research before touting the State monopoly on postage as our only reasonable option. If you are familiar with this part of American history, then I would be interested to know your thoughts about it, and how they relate to your position on this issue.

    Reply

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