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It's ideological. They believe that the government should not be in the postal business. They probably believe that it's harmful to competition in various ways,

• bmitc 6y ago
  The same argument of being harmful to competition could be extended to schools and libraries and <name a service>. It's just mind blowing why we should care about companies more than people. So what if it's harmful to competition? What merit does that have? (These aren't questions for you. They're rhetorical.)
  • usaphp 6y ago
    Probably because your tax money go to support a “broken” business model in their opinion; without asking you if you want to pay for those services. Edit: I am not saying it’s a right thing to do, I am just trying to list a possible reason why billionaires might try to fight against it, per OP question
    • flir 6y ago
      I get a say every time I vote.
      • nickff 6y ago
        Do you think anyone is listening to what you have to say? This comes back to voice vs. exit, which was being discussed on HN yesterday.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
        • flir 6y ago
          Not much, but that's why I support proportional representation, not turning the world into a Libertarian hellhole.
    • jorblumesea 6y ago
      More likely, it's because billionaires see $$$ to be made in divesting the government of a cheap public service. It's the same idea behind the privatization of everything the government does. Cheap, clean water? Why is the government giving this out for pennies when we could be making a killing? It's greed, simple as that. These people are corporatists that believe if there's money to be made, they should be allowed to regardless of the ethical consequences.
      • coliveira 6y ago
        Exactly, capitalists think in terms of opening new markets so why let people have for free something from which they can make a fortune? This way of thinking is like a cancer that grows on society.
        • missedthecue 6y ago
          there is no such thing as a free lunch
          • coliveira 6y ago
            Just because something is not free doesn't mean that a private organization should be entitled to sell it. In many cases this just becomes an additional friction to everyone. For example, health care is something that everybody needs and is not free. But this doesn't mean that paying a private company is the best option. Companies need to profit from health care to exist, which in turn drives up costs for everyone and makes the economy less competitive. This is clearly happening in the US.
            • missedthecue 6y ago
              You are under the impression that a profit motive drives up prices? Would we be in a better situation if the government was in charge of growing and distributing all food?
              • 6y ago
    • jimktrains2 6y ago
      The same could be said for the never ending and needless military campaigns we're in.
    • rblatz 6y ago
      The USPS is self supporting from postage. Your taxes aren't funding a "broken" business model. But they are funding a bunch of people trying to interfere with, and force the USPS out of business.
      • missedthecue 6y ago
        How much tax does the USPS pay? None. No income tax, no property tax, they don't even pay parking tickets. But for some reason, they've been losing money for decades. (yes, even before the whole pension debacle) UPS on the other hand pays income tax, pays property tax, pays higher wages, fully funds their pension plan, and does not have access to the same zero or low interest treasury loans that the USPS does and still makes a profit AND delivers more parcels every year than the USPS.
        • kelnos 6y ago
          > But for some reason, they've been losing money for decades. (yes, even before the whole pension debacle) Citation needed? A quick search suggests that post-pension-debacle, the USPS has lost money every year, to the tune of several billion dollars. Pre-pension-debacle, things were mixed; most years they made a decent profit, some years they lost some money, though much less than they do post-pension-debacle.
      • varenc 6y ago
        USPS is self supporting? It doesn't seem like it. According to this report by they feds they've been operating at a loss for most years since 2008. $2.1B loss in 2018. https://www.prc.gov/sites/default/files/reports/FY%202018%20Financial%20Analysis%20Report.pdf#page=4 https://www.prc.gov/sites/default/files/reports/FY%202018%20...
        • kelnos 6y ago
          The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 requires the USPS to pay over $5B annually to pre-fund future retirement benefits (an amount greater than their usual yearly profits prior to this). No private courier would ever be saddled with a requirement like that. It's clear that this requirement was put into place by people who want to make the USPS look bad so it's an easier argument to kill it.
    • bmitc 6y ago
      It is the wrong perspective to only view public services as businesses.
  • hogFeast 6y ago
    Correct, and that is why schools in many places in the world don't do a great job of teaching students. No competition, no consequences (and compare that to the position students are in...they have to compete like hell, the people teaching them can usually kick back in a unionised job). Btw, I don't support privatised education either, and the evidence on various programs where it has been tried (charter schools in the US, academies in the UK, etc.) are fairly mixed. Are they better than the status quo though? Yes. No question. Not even close (the implication often is that teachers are able to just do great work without being incentivized...this doesn't reflect reality). Also, I live somewhere that had a monopolised last-mile provider. Since privatisation, there has been real improvement in service quality and...amazingly...actual innovation. Is the service good? No. It is still more expensive (somehow) than providers with 1/10th of the infrastructure/network. And the "innovation" is largely copying those other providers. But it is actually getting better (and yes, the main issue is a unionised workforce are holding the company to ransom whilst their market share falls through the floor).
    • bmitc 6y ago
      > Are they better than the status quo though? Yes. No question. The socioeconomic situation in the U.S. is so poor that some of the top things public schools offer their attendees is food, water, shelter, and socialization. The people benefiting from these aspects have 0% of attending private schools. The fact that public schools are struggling with their educational duties is a political one and not one inherent to the service being public.
      • eadmund 6y ago
        > The socioeconomic situation in the U.S. is so poor that some of the top things public schools offer their attendees is food, water, shelter, and socialization. The people benefiting from these aspects have 0% of attending private schools. They would have a >>0% chance of attending private schools if they were each given their share of the public school budget. I am not convinced that would be a good thing — my big concern is that a lot of 'private schools' would pop up which would just hoover up the vouchers, much as one sees with for-profit higher education.
  • sparkling 6y ago
    > It's just mind blowing why we should care about companies more than people. Theres a middle ground here, ya know? At the end of the day we need companies that turn a net-profit by offering goods and services that ultimately lead to the tax revenue to fund those libraries, post offices and schools. > So what if it's harmful to competition? Again, it's a ideological positon. In the mind of people like the Koch brothers, it might be post offices and libraries today, but it might be [insert industry here] tomorrow. And that industry might be your industry. I don't share that view, but i see where they are coming from.
    • glenda 6y ago
      We are seeing that companies with profits don’t necessarily mean that they’re paying their fair share of taxes. Organizations that are able to provide important services, even at a loss, deserve further investment.
    • quickthrowman 6y ago
      UPS, FedEx, DHL, all exist and make money.
      • missedthecue 6y ago
        UPS ships more parcels than the USPS despite having to pay income tax, property tax, higher wages, and not having access to low interest loans. The UPS is more efficient and also loses less mail. For some reason, we're better off with the USPS. At the very least, they should have their entitlement to monopoly removed.
        • mauvehaus 6y ago
          Honest question: when has the postal service ever lost a package of yours? I have used the postal service in some fairly uncommon ways, and I have never had a package go missing or not meet their SLA for Priority Mail. You can send a package to pretty much any town in the country for <$20 and expect it to be there in 3 or 4 days. It’s the next best thing to teleportation, unless you wanted to get it on a Sunday.
  • imgabe 6y ago
    I think the belief is that a competitive business would be incentivized to offer a better service than a government monopoly. This doesn't work out though in rural areas where it's unprofitable for a business to open a branch or provide service. This would be the case for postal service in large parts of the country just like it's the case for Internet providers.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      In that case, why not make suggestions to make the government service better and more efficient instead?
      • usefulcat 6y ago
        Laziness? It’s easier to destroy than to create.
      • Zak 6y ago
        The postal service is a good example of a government function that provides some services that cannot be made efficient. My dad lives part-time in an unincorporated village in Alaska which has a population of 13 as of the 2010 census. Once a week, the USPS essentially charters an airplane to deliver mail there, for which senders pay the same rate they would to send mail anywhere else. The postage obviously doesn't come anywhere near covering the cost of delivery. Without this subsidized mail delivery, which is often used for groceries and other supplies, the full-time population would likely drop to zero. While it's likely that at some point in the future, if that kind of mail service continues to exist, drones will make it more efficient, it will always be much less efficient than delivering mail to people who live in cities. It's reasonable to ask whether it's desirable to continue to subsidize people choosing such a lifestyle, and there's a good argument to be made that it is not. Many of the people who live in remote parts of Alaska have a rugged individualist mentality and a dislike for the idea of subsidies, but tend to get quiet when theirs are mentioned.
        • TulliusCicero 6y ago
          > Many of the people who live in remote parts of Alaska have a rugged individualist mentality and a dislike for the idea of subsidies, but tend to get quiet when theirs are mentioned. To be blunt, that's often true of rural culture in general these days. The simple fact is that providing services to such communities is incredibly inefficient due to a lack of economies of scale. Without government subsidies, they would simply be unable to get services without paying exorbitant rates. That's not the market being immoral or whatever, it's literally just that the cost of providing the service is so high (same reason such communities often have fewer local government services as well). They don't want to come to grips with the hypocrisy of claiming independence while actually actively choosing a highly subsidized lifestyle, and most other people are unwilling to call out the behavior because it's seen as bullying in some fashion.
  • notJim 6y ago
    These people feel the same way about schools. There has been a massive effort underway for many years to privatize schools. It has been most successful in New Orleans, where Katrina provided the "shock" necessary to make it politically feasible to privatize them. Arizona is another test case. I assume they feel the same way about libraries and every other government service, but not sure if they've made any headway there.
  • zdragnar 6y ago
    Your rhetorical questions are founded on a faulty (and incredibly uncharitable) assumption: that "we should care about putting companies over people." It isn't- for most, it is about preventing the waste that tends to happen when organizations (be they corporations or government bureaucracies) become complacent and uncompetitive. Whether corporate raiders or rubber rooms for bad union members, any system can get taken advantage of. That doesn't mean that you should assume the worst from the people you disagree with.
    • bmitc 6y ago
      > It isn't- for most, it is about preventing the waste that tends to happen when organizations (be they corporations or government bureaucracies) become complacent and uncompetitive. You have a much different experience with companies than I do then. I have been hung up on by UPS customer service. I have had to simply stop ordering from Amazon because they were delivering greater than 50% of books damaged, forcing me to waste time and money returning them despite numerous reports and complaints. There was nothing I could do and not a single person cared. It's because these companies don't care about providing a service. They care about making money. And my problems as a customer weren't enough for them to lose money on, so they weren't problems to them. Does the USPS have problems? Yes. But at least in those cases I can actually find an actual person, usually local, to speak to. But that isn't the point. You're arguing that somehow companies aren't complacent when that is my exact opposite experience, especially with delivery companies. > That doesn't mean that you should assume the worst from the people you disagree with. Where did I do that? Especially in the case of USPS, the Koch's complaining about so-called unfair competition is exactly caring about companies more than people.
  • dungdang 6y ago
    i do care about people. myself included. why do i, paying insane urban rent, subsidize a farmer who already gets my tax dollars to grow too much corn? it costs probably $10 to deliver a letter to his farm. he pays ¢42. i pay the rest. his letter should be $10. mine should be a penny. you know - the actual cost of delivery, paid by the actual person. fuck the post office.
    • posguy 6y ago
      How much does it cost to provide accurate pricing? Often the cost of metering can drastically outweigh the economic value of a simple, easy to understand/predict shipping service. This is why flat rate packaging is so popular across FedEx, UPS and USPS.
      • dungdang 6y ago
        umm, no. it's illegal. a competing post service was launched, with variable rates, and the gov shut it down. by law, your rate has to be flat.
        • posguy 6y ago
          What are you on about? UPS and FedEx will happily charge you more to deliver to high cost locations, whereas getting a 50lb parcel overnighted from one low cost location to another is usually around $30 if you have a volume rate. There is hefty price discrimination against high cost to serve customers baked into UPS and FedEx's model, and smaller couriers like DHL and Amazon Shipping happily blacklist large parts of the USA due to price.
          • maxlybbert 6y ago
            I believe it’s a reference to the Private Express Statutes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes ). I don’t remember the law requiring flat rates, but the rates are regulated and effectively required to be more than the post office’s. FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. can’t legally compete with the post office on price.
  • missedthecue 6y ago
    "It's just mind blowing why we should care about companies more than people." So food is really important and vital. Should the government be in charge of growing and distributing food? Of course not. This experiment has been tried with horribly deadly results. The basic fact of the matter is that the market is far more effective at fairly distributing goods and services. If you look at the major sources of inequalities today in our society, they are in education, policing, and the justice system, all of which are under public control. Interestingly enough, the tort system, which is partly under private control, is far more fair than the criminal justice system that is under public control, which is why killer cops never go to prison but their victims get million dollar damage payments. (as the old axiom goes, if the king controls criminal punishment, the kings friends get away with murder). The point is, it's a total non-sequitur to assume that just because a decentralized system is the primary means of distributing something therefore implies that it only exists to make corporate profits at the expense of us poor people. Individuals like myself who are for wider privatization believe so because we care about people. I think people will be better off if the government isn't in charge of growing food, and I think people would be better off if more systems were privatized. It's not because I have a fetish for companies, it's because I think the general welfare would improve.
    • EdwardDiego 6y ago
      Doesn't the US healthcare system, when compared to other countries, stand as a direct example of how private companies aren't inherently better at equitable essential service provision?
      • DuskStar 6y ago
        The US health care system isn't a good example of anything except regulatory capture. (It's a bad example of a ton of things, including both "government run health care" - thanks VA - and "free market health care") EDIT: though it does still provide the best care in the world, if you're able to pay for it.
        • learc83 6y ago
  • zhoujianfu 6y ago
    I think if we had a real UBI, then doing away with services like the USPS and public schools would be okay. These services were designed to help make things affordable to people who could not afford the private version. Maybe instead we should have just made sure everybody could afford the private version, by directly giving them money!
    • bmitc 6y ago
      That doesn't seem to make sense to me. We should give people money only to remove services, increasing their costs, likely far beyond any basic income could provide for?
  • rayiner 6y ago
    “Caring about companies more than people” is empty rhetoric. People care about companies and competition because companies create the things people want and need. Indeed, lots of people believe that schools, for example, should be subject to competition. Places like Sweden have school competition via vouchers.
    • js2 6y ago
      Sweden's schools follow national educational guidelines so they are more like what we call charter schools in the U.S. than the voucher system some districts have in the U.S. and what DeVos argues for. Also, Sweden's students perform more poorly now than they did before vouchers were implemented, though of course people argue over the cause of the decline. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/is-sweden-proof-that-school-choice-doesnt-improve-education https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/is-sweden-proof-that-...
      • rayiner 6y ago
        They’re not what we would call charter schools. For example, you can use school vouchers in Sweden for religious education.
        • js2 6y ago
          Is this statement from the page I linked to wrong then? > In contrast to American private schools, Sweden’s free schools don’t charge tuition — they draw on government funds to operate — and are required to follow Sweden’s national curriculum. They’re more comparable to American charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
          • rayiner 6y ago
            I mean I guess what part you’re focused on. The Swedish program is widely called a “voucher” program. It has the essential element of competition: per student funding follows the student. As your quote states, it’s like charter schools rather than tuition-charging private schools in that money doesn’t go through the parents, but directly to schools. But like the De Voss proposal, and unlike American charter schools, Swedish school choice encompasses a much wider variety of schools, including religious schools.
• _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  The existence of billionaires is far more harmful to competition than government is.
  • toomuchtodo 6y ago
    If you’re a billionaire, it’s likely hard to understand why you’re the problem (as well as an economic system configured that allowed such wealth concentration).
    • devilduck 6y ago
      It is also hard to understand for the droves of people who wish they could become billionaires
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • dungdang 6y ago
    but what about dictators in nuclear armed countries? an whatabout african armies in zimbabwe killing people? whatabout hitler? the existence of hitler was far more harmful than billionairs.
    • BoysenberryPi 6y ago
      I don't understand what this Whataboutism has to do with the topic at hand.
      • dungdang 6y ago
        exactly.
        • brendoelfrendo 6y ago
          You’re commenting like you won, but everyone else is just confused what your original point was.
• ouid 6y ago
  I dont think the problem with the Kochs is their tunnel vision.
• pryce 6y ago
  Ideological is close; If you are a billionaire, you didn't perform a billion dollars worth of labor; you got that way being the recipient of profits of significant fractions of entire industries based predominantly on other people's labor. If you make money this way, untapped resources don't necessarily look like untapped oil fields, instead they might look like entire industries that (with friendly legislators) can suddenly be opened up private profit (especially yours), or industries that can be captured into monopolies, or nations whose current economic situation can be exploited in ways that put large amounts of money into your pocket.
  • nerfhammer 6y ago
    according to the labor theory of value google should be rewarded less than altavista depending on which performed more labor
    • rudolph9 6y ago
      Although those are both search engines altvista produced drastically different results than google and the comparison of the results is generally subjective. The quality of the search result is what largely drew people to google (I was very young at the time please correct me if I’m mistaken). Regardless of which entity delivers a package the quality of the result can generally be objectively judged (cost, duration, package care, etc). Depending on the entity delivering search results of e.g the term “bear” the quality is highly subjective (e.g black bear wiki, Chicago bears, polar bear wiki, bear Halloween Costume amazon page, Berenstain Bears, etc). Not to mention the results are continuously changing. I’m not really familiar with labor theory but I’m inclined to think your analogy isn’t applicable to the discussion of privatizing USPS. Could you rephrase your comment in terms of sorting algorithms? Say a bubble sort would be rewarded more than a merge sort? Maybe that would better articulate your point??
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • nerfhammer 6y ago
• rayiner 6y ago
  It’s not just “they.” Postal privatization is common, and subsidies are closely watched: https://www.oecd.org/daf/competition/sectors/1920548.pdf https://www.oecd.org/daf/competition/sectors/1920548.pdf. The Danish post, for example, is a private company owned by a Swedish company, and subsidies are closely tracked.
  • jahaja 6y ago
    Once again, the privatization to form "Postnord" has been an utter failure and is a source of constant ridicule here in Sweden due to its newfound unreliability.
• beepboopbeep 6y ago
  Yes but ideological means tt's a systemic crippling of government pillars in order to collapse the federal government or otherwise render it inept.