However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.
On a couple different levels:
1. Some people (like libertarians) have an ideological opposition to government-provided services, and believe all or nearly all services provided by the government should be abolished and replaced with the "free market."
2. An ideological belief that private business is "efficient" and government is "bloated and wasteful" by definition.
3. An lazy belief that "the government should be run like a business," therefore the tools you use to evaluate a business (like profitability), should be used to evaluate government.
4. etc.
I think those are distinct beliefs, but they kind of feed into each other and support each other. Like if you believe government services are wasteful and business efficient, it would follow you would improve things by abolishing the government services.
This is achieveable with “If you want to be licensed to deliver postal services, you have to deliver everywhere without discrimnating on price”. And the free market will find ways to make that work.
In any event, the US Constitution requires a post office.
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8
> The Congress shall have Power ...
> To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.
This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but is the poorest people who gets the worst of it.
Twisted and myope logic is the concepts of price and value that socialists have. That's why socialism always fail: socialist don't understand the value of things.
The proof is the experimental results: life is always better in capitalist countries, and socialist always escape from socialism towards capitalism. Even socialists don't want to migrate to cuba or Venezuela.
Marxism is twisted and myope because Marxist define Marxism as the rejection of logic. Your Marxist posture is incompatible with reason.
Profit-seeking for essential services is the epitome of selfishness that can only be justified through twisted ideologies. When applied to governments that are supposed to take the least and give the most, it is pure evil, just skimming off goods and services someone desperately needs to put that in your pocket.
Because value is relative to other valued things.
Resources are limited, so what you spend on "essential services" cannot be spent on other things.
Healthcare is "essential", but if you spend 100% of resources in healthcare, it will never be enough. You can spend billions to keep alive a person more minutes, and he will die anyways, but society would lose all housing, all food, all clothing, and would be miserable, so healthcare doesn't had infinite value.
If you find any "essential services" too expensive, is because you need other things more important, like having food or a house.
If the state pays for "free" healthcare, it has no limit to spending, and you cannot more get a house, food, clothing, or anything else.
That's why "essential services" have a price, like anything else, and should be restricted to be profitable.
Profit means that the value produced is higher than the cost, because the cost are other things that you need more.
You can spend exactly the same labor building the cake or smashing trash, but the smashed trash is not worth the same as the cake despite spending the same labor, so the labor value doesn't explain the value of the product.
You pay 3 for a. Ake only if you value what you buy more than what you pay, so you win by buying. Otherwise you would not buy. The seller had no power on how much you value it, so you decide how much is the cake valued when you decide to pay or not pay for it. That's independent of the cost of manufacturing. You don't care how much it had cost something you buy in the supermarket. You don't even know. You decide by judging if you are better buying it or something else you could get with that money.
Prices are created by consumers and represent priorities, not absolute value.
Because the value of things is decided by consumers, the value is independent of the cost of production, and for that reason is a lie that the difference between value and cost is the labor.
If labor were worth the difference between product value and cost, it would not be justified to produce anything, because at the end of day, nothing would be won by working. The final value would be the same than at the start of the day. It only makes sense to work if the final product is more valuable than what was spent, including labor.
Labor has limited value. You decide if you spend your labor cleaning your room, or if you are better doing nothing, or playing a videogame, because your labor has a limited value. You would not do any work if the benefit is smaller that the value of your work.
If labor were worth the final value . Minus other cost, you could not decide were to work. You would spend the same labor building a pile of trash or something more productive. A car would be worth the same as a pile of trash, despite requiring the same labor.
(subsidize: not only do we incurring retirement obligations from the general fund, we charge the same amount to deliver a letter to rural Alaska as we do to a place across the street)
We could cut costs by reducing mail delivery frequency country-wide and more in costlier areas. In the age of satellite Internet, the need for delivering a physical thing quickly is not something we need to federally subsidize (argument for slowly: yes). In my suburban area I'd be completely unaffected by 2/week delivery. People in rural areas need to pay the cost of living rural now that we don't have anyone subsistence farming.