Yes, the reasons that the USPS is important are mainly legal reasons. Your personal frustrations with what I presume is commercial mail is not one of those reasons. You have alternatives for your commercial needs, and you are free to use them.
The USPS exists because the government has needs that commercial carriers simply cannot fulfill; here's the first 3 examples I could think of:
1. A guarantee of service via direct control. The federal government directly controls the USPS board. Commercial services have no obligation to fulfill any of the government's needs, and could even be legally obligated by their fiduciary duty to deny those needs, even if they wanted to do otherwise. The needs of the government are not always profitable, often they're not.
2. Proper chain of custody. Email simply doesn't address this, and is notoriously awful at it. Commercial delivery services do this better than email, but do so voluntarily, and to their own liking (see #1). On the other hand, some USPS services like Registered Mail can be used for some types of classified documents.
3. Longstanding (and strong) legal precedent regarding its use. Mail has a ton of privilege over electronic communications. It also has privilege over commercial deliveries.
As for the ability of email to reach everyone -- I think your views might be biased a bit by your experiences. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/22/some-americ...
For a middle ground, I would like USPS to offer a service where they scan and send you the docs and you agree to some terms. They already scan the addresses and show you the informed mail digest. I don't care if they open it and scan it. It's all junk anyway.
If the official channel was email and I said "let's switch to snail mail" you would all rightfully call me an idiot. You/we are all wedded to a really bad paradigm.
There's nothing stopping the government from letting you opt into an official email box.
If the government controlled the entire email system, like they do the USPS, it wouldn’t be email as you know it today.
But as email stands today, it relies on the voluntary cooperation of third-parties who operate on a best-effort basis. It has no governance.
That’s a show stopper, not only for the US government, but for most governments around the world. I’m not aware of any country that has found it reasonable to do as you’re suggesting. Even Estonia, which has online elections, still finds it prudent to have a national mail service.
The free market has nothing to do with this.
>When some people don't get their UPS/FedEx/etc, if you call up to complain, the answer is "Oh yeah, we don't service your address. Have a nice day."
And if you call USPS, they're just going to jump straight to "it's lost. have a nice day." I don't see how that is better.
Anyway, USPS absolutely does not deliver to every address. This is a myth that won't die for some reason.
>Functioning governments really really need a way to physically deliver items to a person in a way that cannot be replaced by private carriers or email systems.
Can you source this claim? What does my government need to mail me that can't be done by email?
>This isn't about you getting your Amazon packages or your power bill.
I don't use Amazon or get my power bill by snail mail. Not sure why you're bringing these up. They're irrelevant.
>This is about the operational stability of basic government services.
We might need a reliable parcel deliverer (ie, something other that USPS).
>There are places in the US where UPS and FedEx do not deliver, and people live there
And there are places where USPS doesn't deliver. At my house, on a regular basis for example, they don't deliver important parcels.
Also many communities around the country and outside of the country. Email fixes basically all of this.
>-- people who the US government is legally required to correspond with.
Who they should be able to correspond with by email in most cases. In other cases they could contract with a more reliable carrier or have a pared down service for those remote area.
In still more cases, the USPS doesn't service certain areas at all.
>They cannot fulfill those obligations without the USPS.
Nor can they fulfill them solely with USPS. We need to acknowledge that email is a faster, safer and more reliable source of communicating with most people. Its almost 2020.