It's not anti-rural sentiment. I understand the case for subsidizing infrastructure for underserved populations, but I think the postal service does this at to

It's not anti-rural sentiment. I understand the case for subsidizing infrastructure for underserved populations, but I think the postal service does this at too great a cost. For example: Every day my mailbox is filled with paper that goes directly into the recycle bin. USPS representatives sell direct marketing services to businesses who send all this junk mail because it's so inexpensive to send. Imagine if your ISP was affiliated with a spammer. This is effectively what the USPS does and it wastes lots of time, paper, and other resources. The reason the USPS supports paper spam is simply to help fund its egalitarian mission of delivering mail in spite of too-low prices. The USPS does not pay the cost of recycling the paper or the cost of emptying everyone's mailbox of it every day. These are significant negative externalities. Instead, why not simply subsidize rural mail by giving residents of rural areas some free stamps every month? It seems that making the rest of us deal with removing unwanted garbage from our mailboxes every day is a horribly inefficient way to achieve the egalitarian objective you cite.