Conservatives have always been very blunt about their opposition to the United States Postal Service. Milton Friedman said plainly: privatize it. On the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, a McKinsey partner says the agency is “obsolete” and must be “phased out,” that its popularity is solely due to “nostalgia.” The Trump administration has not tried to disguise its intentions. Its “Delivering Government Solutions in the 2st Century” document announces plainly that the administration wants to privatize the service, turning it into a “private postal operator that delivers mail fewer days per week and to more central locations (not door delivery).” The administration says:
It sounds awful, yes. But conservatives are always going to be committed to privatizing the post office, no matter what. This is because they hold firmly to an ideological conviction that government is incapable of working as well as private, for profit-companies. They believe, as a matter of religious faith rather than evidence, that the public sector is necessarily ineffective, even when the USPS is ranked the most efficient postal service in the world, beating out many privatized postal services.
If a government agency were to function well, it would threaten right-wing ideology in a very serious way. When public services work well, they make it difficult to convince people of the argument that strong public institutions are the “road to serfdom” and that the welfare state is a form of slavery. Look at the National Health Service in Britain: despite the right-wing myths in America about its uselessness, the NHS is so popular among Britons that a Conservative prime minister like Boris Johnson has to praise it highly and pay tribute to its greatness. Once people have experienced good free-at-point-of-use public services, they like them, and they don’t want to get rid of them.
This creates an incentive for conservatives in government to make the user experience of government as dreadful as possible. If people absolutely hate every interaction they have with public airports or schools or the DMV, they will certainly be more receptive to the argument that government cannot succeed and must be turned over to for-profit corporations. Nevermind that in other countries, public schools and public airports function perfectly well, thus disproving the idea that the problem is that ours are public rather than that ours are poorly-run. Americans are rarely told about what other countries are like, so we do not get to see that you can eliminate private schools almost entirely and still have an excellent education system.
Donald Trump has insisted that he wants the USPS to raise prices on packages, possibly “by up to four times,” and threatened to withhold coronavirus aid to the agency if they did not increase prices. USPS packages are already not cheap and go up constantly, and Trump’s idea would make the USPS more expensive than FedEx and UPS. The postal service is the most popular government agency, with over 90% of Americans wanting it to receive renewed financial assistance from the U.S. government. A good way to try to destroy that public goodwill is to do what Trump wants to do: jack up prices and to delay mail deliveries.
A private entity would also have greater ability to adjust product pricing in response to changes in demand or operating costs. Freeing USPS to more fully negotiate pay and benefits rather than prescribing participation in costly Federal personnel benefit programs, and allowing it to follow private sector practices in compensation and labor relations, could further reduce costs.So: a post office that operated (1) to serve investor profits rather than the public good, (2) has higher prices (3) pays lower wages and cuts workers’ benefits and (4) delivers a few days a week, and not door-to-door but to “central locations” that you have to shlep your packages from. This is the dream!
It sounds awful, yes. But conservatives are always going to be committed to privatizing the post office, no matter what. This is because they hold firmly to an ideological conviction that government is incapable of working as well as private, for profit-companies. They believe, as a matter of religious faith rather than evidence, that the public sector is necessarily ineffective, even when the USPS is ranked the most efficient postal service in the world, beating out many privatized postal services.If a government agency were to function well, it would threaten right-wing ideology in a very serious way. When public services work well, they make it difficult to convince people of the argument that strong public institutions are the “road to serfdom” and that the welfare state is a form of slavery. Look at the National Health Service in Britain: despite the right-wing myths in America about its uselessness, the NHS is so popular among Britons that a Conservative prime minister like Boris Johnson has to praise it highly and pay tribute to its greatness. Once people have experienced good free-at-point-of-use public services, they like them, and they don’t want to get rid of them.
This creates an incentive for conservatives in government to make the user experience of government as dreadful as possible. If people absolutely hate every interaction they have with public airports or schools or the DMV, they will certainly be more receptive to the argument that government cannot succeed and must be turned over to for-profit corporations. Nevermind that in other countries, public schools and public airports function perfectly well, thus disproving the idea that the problem is that ours are public rather than that ours are poorly-run. Americans are rarely told about what other countries are like, so we do not get to see that you can eliminate private schools almost entirely and still have an excellent education system.
Donald Trump has insisted that he wants the USPS to raise prices on packages, possibly “by up to four times,” and threatened to withhold coronavirus aid to the agency if they did not increase prices. USPS packages are already not cheap and go up constantly, and Trump’s idea would make the USPS more expensive than FedEx and UPS. The postal service is the most popular government agency, with over 90% of Americans wanting it to receive renewed financial assistance from the U.S. government. A good way to try to destroy that public goodwill is to do what Trump wants to do: jack up prices and to delay mail deliveries.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. For an example of the "inefficiency" set-up, see also: USPS workers sound alarm about new policies that may affect 2020 mail-in voting CNN.]
[ed. For an example of the "inefficiency" set-up, see also: USPS workers sound alarm about new policies that may affect 2020 mail-in voting CNN.]
