I meant that it's disingenuous to portray small-government proponents like he did by using a strawman of someone upset at a clear government power. It adds nothing to the conversation.
For many decades (certainly at least through the 1990s, I think) there was a popular narrative that made poor postal service synonymous with inept government. Almost every citizen regularly visited a post office, and everybody had at least one poor experience. Standing in line at the post office was the equivalent of standing in bread lines in communist countries. This shared experience made the postal service a key talking point by politicians when selling small government, pro-capitalist policies.
For various reasons this narrative has subsided. It probably wouldn't even occur to younger people to perceive in the post office reflections of a wider debate about government. Indeed, for some the post office is seen as a pragmatic answer to providing banking services to poor communities, only distantly related to or even entirely divorced from the big government vs small government debate. Actually, I think in general the debate on both the right and left has shifted away from bickering over the size of government, per se, and instead emphasizes individual rights and injuries.[1]
It's why you'll hear the echos of demands on the right to completely privatize the USPS, almost entirely from the older generation because newer conservative generations couldn't care less unless you're talking about Jeff Bezos.
[1] IMO I think that conservatives won the small government debate in the 1990s, for better or worse. There was a confluence of events in both America and Europe that effectively resolved the debate. Rather, policy proposals these days either rely on some public-private model, or simply attempt to exact concessions from private industry. The government directly doing something themselves is completely off the table. See, e.g., rayiner's comparison of Stockholm's and LA's fiber initiatives.
For various reasons this narrative has subsided. It probably wouldn't even occur to younger people to perceive in the post office reflections of a wider debate about government. Indeed, for some the post office is seen as a pragmatic answer to providing banking services to poor communities, only distantly related to or even entirely divorced from the big government vs small government debate. Actually, I think in general the debate on both the right and left has shifted away from bickering over the size of government, per se, and instead emphasizes individual rights and injuries.[1]
It's why you'll hear the echos of demands on the right to completely privatize the USPS, almost entirely from the older generation because newer conservative generations couldn't care less unless you're talking about Jeff Bezos.
[1] IMO I think that conservatives won the small government debate in the 1990s, for better or worse. There was a confluence of events in both America and Europe that effectively resolved the debate. Rather, policy proposals these days either rely on some public-private model, or simply attempt to exact concessions from private industry. The government directly doing something themselves is completely off the table. See, e.g., rayiner's comparison of Stockholm's and LA's fiber initiatives.