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Should the government bail out the post office?

Should government bail out / subsidize the post office?

  • Yes

    Votes: 5 41.7%
  • No

    Votes: 5 41.7%
  • Other

    Votes: 2 16.7%

  • Total voters
    12
The post office long ago outlived its usefulness. UPS, DHL, and FedEx can do everything it does better.
DL went bankrupt.
UPS and FedEx don't have daily service to every address.
The post office has union issues and mass benefits while UPS and FedEx largely are part time employee sweat shops for handling. FedEx uses contractors and not employees with benefits. There as gobs of rules on the post office that carriers don't have.
The post office must survive for many reasons including not losing benefits and retirement for hundreds of thousands of people. Dropping Saturdays and even going to 3 day a week delivery would work fine.
 
Agreed.

$.42 to send a physical piece of paper 3000 miles to someone elses door in 2 days time is a mind-boggling bargain.

Yes it is! FedEx or UPS would charge about $10 to $15 even to deliver a letter across country to a specific address.
 
And there's the problem that you face. The postal service is Constitutional power of the Congress:

Article 1, section 8 - The Powers of Congress:
"...To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;"

I'm also fairly certain that the Founding Fathers didn't envision that the post roads would become anything like the Interstate system. That doesn't change the fact that Congress is responsible for them.

I'm also fairly certain that the Founding Fathers didn't envision the commerce clause being used to justify unconstitutional actions such as the the Drug War.
Sharp observation. Do you think the government cares?
 
They are a monopoly when it comes to standard mail delivery.

It's illegal for someone to set up a standard mail delivery service.

Can you cite such a law that prohibits a private standard mail delivery service?

You should read about how private firms where handling it prior to it finally being declared illegal.

Privately owned mail delivery services were going to be apart of our country.

And what law or case are you citing this position on?
 
Alex Libman

Fair enough. It's got a monopoly on low priority, low weight, high volume. But given the exceedingly low margins (and extreme start up costs), it's real questionable if a firm would even bother with that.

Notice the link to Anarcho-Capitalist hero Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company in my previous post. He was able to provide postal service better and cheaper than the government, but Uncle Sam initiated aggression against him, as they would against UPS / FedEx if they ever start to offer delivery of standard (non-urgent) mail, or go below a certain price, etc. :(

I'm not so sure about that. First of all, that firm operated back in the late 1800s. Comparing that to today's operation is apples and oranges. A great deal of the cost savings that allowed the USPS to generate actual profits is from mass scale. And FedEx/UPS are geared towards high weight, generally low volume per customer, high priority. Switching to a low priority, high volume, low weight with hundreds of millions of delivery points every day (rather than just perhaps a million at most) is an entirely different animal.
 
Can you cite such a law that prohibits a private standard mail delivery service?

"First Class mail volume (which is protected by legal monopoly)"

[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Post_Office]United States Postal Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

And what law or case are you citing this position on?

Using historical facts, bulk mail delivery was being done by outside companies.

Intra city mail delivery was also being done, if I remember correctly a law was passed making it illegal for private businesses to charge less than the postal service charged.

I'm still trying to find the article I was reading in reference to this.
 
Fair enough. It's got a monopoly on low priority, low weight, high volume. But given the exceedingly low margins (and extreme start up costs), it's real questionable if a firm would even bother with that.

I great solution to this is P.O. Boxes, in fact UPS has its own set of P.O. boxes that use the stores real address so you can get anything delivered to it, unlike USPS P.O. Boxes.
 
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