Food is a different matter in many ways that don't make it a good point of comparison with the USPS. For example:
Many foods and ingredients can be stocked up on intermittently - say, once a week - and will last for a good amount of time in the fridge or freezer. So you can take a trip to a grocery store or other distribution facility a few times a month, even if it's far from you. You can also pretty safely and legally have a friend pick up groceries for you if you don't have a car or are unable to leave the house, but having someone go deal with your mail would be considerably more difficult (for legal reasons and otherwise).
Lots of mail is time sensitive - even if that ballot you're being mailed won't melt in the distribution center like a neglected package of chocolates would, there's a fixed deadline for you to fill out the ballot and a fixed deadline for it to make it to the processing facility. If delivery of that ballot - or the pick-up and return delivery - is delayed, it's worthless. As such, daily mail delivery is essential in many ways even if people don't receive mail every day. Incidentally, we've had widespread issues with ballot delivery and postmarking in the last year or so, so it's a real problem and not a hypothetical.
On that note, the government has to send mail to every citizen multiple times a year, they're going to have to pay private mailing services for it anyway... How much taxpayer money is actually being saved by privatizing it?
I'm not quite sure I get your argument about why dealing with other people's mail would be difficult? Using the post office's services is exactly 'other people dealing with your mail'.
(If there are any special laws that give the post office more rights than you can voluntarily give your friend or a business, those laws ought to be amended.)
You have an argument about time sensitivity. But I don't understand how you arrive at the frequency of daily? Why not weekly? Why not hourly?
For voting, weekly or even monthly would surely be enough. Election dates are known far enough in advance. Any additional time pressure is purely there by legislative fiat. (And we also already assume that people who vote in person can find their way to the polling station on their own. We don't argue for a government rickshaw to cart them there.)
> On that note, the government has to send mail to every citizen multiple times a year, they're going to have to pay private mailing services for it anyway... How much taxpayer money is actually being saved by privatizing it?
A few times a year is much less than the total volume of mail.
I was going to type out some philosophical arguments about hypotheticals and counterfactuals here. But no need for that. We can just look at the impact of postal privatisations in eg Europe.
In any case, what I'm arguing for would be a level playing field and the absence of political pressure.
See eg the whole argument about how 'the evil party has decreed that money must be set aside for known future obligations, and that is bad'. You only get that because the whole thing is politicized.
I'd say to abolish the universal service obligation and the postal monopoly. Let all providers compete on a level playing field.
The one thing not discussed is how does one hold third party providers to any standard. Right now, Fedex Ground is basically contractors 10 layers deep. They have no incentive to deliver anything correctly but bumrush packages out.
When it comes to legal mail it's a huge disaster waiting to happen if Fedex was supposed to deliver a jury summons and the delivery guy being paid dirt just chucked it out and now you are in jail on a bench warrant. Sure they'll just slap Fedex with a fine and you got unemployed in the mean time.
The other issue is security. Many apartment complexes and even neighborhoods nowadays have locked central mailrooms but they provide a key for a USPS worker to enter. Those keys are tied to a keychain for the route. Are buildings and individuals now supposed to give out keys to every fly by night contractor in existence that changes every day?
> The one thing not discussed is how does one hold third party providers to any standard.
Make them post a bond, if they want to do business with you. If your business is sufficiently important (like perhaps government letters might be), they'll post the bond.
How is your example with the jury summons different in the USPS world? How does the FedEx guy differ from the USPS guy?
> Are buildings and individuals now supposed to give out keys to every fly by night contractor in existence that changes every day?
No, why? The situation is basically the same that we already have for packages or very urgent mail. Look at what solutions are employed there.
In practice, you'd provide access to some trusted providers. A new market entrant would have to negotiate access, or arrange last mile services with an existing provider, or refuse to deliver to those areas etc.
> In economics, a public good (also known as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, in that individuals cannot be excluded from use or could benefit from without paying for it, and where use by one individual does not reduce availability to others or the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.
Basically, defense of the realm is commonly seen as such a public good.
However, food and postal services are excludable and rivalrous.
Delivery of mail is not a public good by the economics definition used in the Wikipedia article:
(1) A provider of postal services can exclude you from either sending or receiving mail. (Excludable)
(2) There's only a limited capacity to send mail at any given time. The postman can only carry so much. (Rivalrous)
(Of course, sustained high demand for mail delivery services can lead to an expansion of supply, ie they can higher more mail man. Just like sustained high demand for bread means more bakeries will produce more bread.)
That postal services charge the sender rather the receiver is mostly incidental and not important for the distinction. They could just as well charge you for receiving mail. Similar to how people in the US seem to pay for receiving calls on their cell phones (I heard).
Your own logic is falling apart as you used the example of military as a public good (which it is). However, it doesn't pass your test.
(1) The military can main it's own people, excluding them from receiving protection. They can also choose not to enter an engagement, leaving US citizens behind. (Excludable)
(2) There's only limited military at any given time. If every other country in the world started attacking the US, we would reach our limit to protect everyone. Probably why the uber-wealthy have private security forces and private islands. (Rivalrous)
You are somewhat right. Those very arguments are brought up on the Wikipedia page:
> Some question whether defense is a public good. Murray Rothbard argues:
>> "'national defense' is surely not an absolute good with only one unit of supply. It consists of specific resources committed in certain definite and concrete ways—and these resources are necessarily scarce. A ring of defense bases around New York, for example, cuts down the amount possibly available around San Francisco."[14]
> Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and Don Lavoie note,
>> "Americans in Alaska and Hawaii could very easily be excluded from the U.S. government's defense perimeter, and doing so might enhance the military value of at least conventional U.S. forces to Americans in the other forty-eight states. But, in general, an additional ICBM in the U.S. arsenal can simultaneously protect everyone within the country without diminishing its services".[15]
Basically, 'public goods' are an important concept, because standard economics suggests that anything that's not a 'public good' can be better provisioned by private, profit seeking actors.
The argument we just brought might suggest that we should privatize the military as well. I did not want to make that argument here, but it's perfectly cromulent.
In practice, how much a given good is a public good is a matter of degree and context.
In most context bread is less of a public good than defense.
But with sufficient effort, you can exclude people living in the same country from defense. Whereas there's little effort required to exclude people from eating your bread.
Similarly to make eg the benefits of nuclear deterrence rivalrous, you need lots of effort or extreme scenarios.
If you have a good or service with a large fixed cost, but a low variable cost, you can discuss about how much it makes sense to treat it as a public vs private good. For example, software or intellectual property in general has almost 0 variable costs, but copyright is a legal invention to make software excludable.
Networks are in-between: the postal service or the phone service or even buses or planes on a schedule have large fixed costs, but when below saturation, they have low variable costs.
I suggest we treat the postal service like we treat buses and planes.
