[Solar19]

Interesting choice. They desperately need a new sled. When she's not misdelivering my packages to other people, I feel terrible for my USPS mail carrier during the summer months. Those Grumman POS mail vehicles have no air conditioning. Being from Arizona, I didn't even know that was a thing, an actual configuration you could choose for a vehicle made after the Vietnam War. I think she plugs in a fan. I hope they get some kind of hardship pay when it's 95+ degrees out.

But... I have mixed feelings given their coercive monopoly status. It's actually illegal to offer mail delivery in the US. The USPS even raided corporate mailrooms in New York in the 2000s in an attempt to enforce the letter of the law re: urgent mail. The exception to their mail monopoly is urgent communication, which is why FedEx and UPS are able to offer overnight and 2/3-day express delivery, but not regular letter mail. That's the one category that the USPS doesn't have a monopoly on. So the USPS actually tried to determine – to judge itself – whether the stuff these companies were sending via FedEx and other competitors was in fact urgent. They opened people's overnight envelopes to try to evaluate the true urgency level manifested within, as if they could even begin to judge or assess that characteristic of other people's communications... Thankfully they sparked a big backlash and haven't pulled a stunt like that since.

There's nothing about mail or delivering stuff or logistics more broadly that would seem to require government involvement. There's nothing particular about government that makes it uniquely well suited to delivering mail. This should've been privatized from the very beginning. Britain privatized the Royal Mail, and there are lots of other examples of privatized mail carriers. Sometimes people object to the anticipated cost of mailing a letter to maybe a remote town, on the assumption that it would cost a lot more than the flat artificial stamp price today, but I don't understand the objection. If the natural or actual cost of something is X, why would anyone assert that they should be able to pay less than X?

Anyway, they took far too long to choose a new vehicle, and they'll probably overpay. A private company would be more responsible and disciplined. It reminds me of Lysander Spooner's American Letter Mail Company. He decided to try to compete with the USPS, and charged lower prices. They shut him down by force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company

It would be so fun to start a mail carrier in his honor. There are so many opportunities for innovation and creativity in mail and package delivery, and the vehicles could double as ice cream trucks on weekends.

[WoahNoun]

If mail was privatized, they would just stop delivering to rural addresses. Which I'm fine with. Rural communities are subsidized by the federal government far, far too much.