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.

A more charitable interpretation might be that someone who wants postal to be private might want a more focused central public organization. If our representatives aren't thinking about postal services maybe they'll be better at other, more important things.

Not sure if a charitable interpretation is warranted but I can imagine good intentions leading to the same actions.

according to the labor theory of value google should be rewarded less than altavista depending on which performed more labor

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??

not really about USPS, just the idea that the Kochs want the USPS privatized because they personally want to steal the value of labor being performed there. there's no reason to believe the Koch's are interested in or would be good at running postal services; probably fedex/ups/dhl/amazon or someone else would be better at that, leaving no particular material advantage to the Kochs. the labor theory of value being espoused by the person I was replying to is just an easily skewered tangent in an emotionally colinear conspiratorial vein. as far as I can tell the Kochs are just ideologues.

Google rose to prominence by capturing the labor of others (links created by users and site authors between sites) and accruing the value of that labor to itself through automation. It effectively swallowed up the value of unpaid labor that existed at a scale with which Altavista could never compete.

Altavista had access to the same web that Google had.

Google created a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to its door.

I agree entirely, but the premise was that more labor went into Altavista’s indexing than Google’s, which is inaccurate. Google was better at capturing the value of labor external to itself, which was far more labor than was ever used to build Altavista.

The American way - get other people to do your work! I still remember my CS profs saying they best quality of a programmer is laziness!

hmm this may be a good point.

is it really capturing value or is it creating value? people made links because they wanted to make links anyway. the value of links to a search engine doesn't exist without a search engine, and the existing value of links isn't diminished by that (except for the specific case of a manually curated link directory, e.g. the original yahoo).

The links were the prerequisite of Google/page rank, so Google only realizes that value once they had been created. They added value to that labor by making visible and accessible a dimension of this underlying network to others, but then channeled that mostly to themselves and ultimately disrupted, perhaps even destroyed (depending on your perspective), the signaling they observed.

They were not alone in this, but it’s hard to compare their impact on the web to say, various forms of cataloging of works in library networks, and come away seeing them as impartially additive.

This misses the point of the example, though. The point is that not all labor has the same value. Albert Einstein's thoughts produced a lot more social utility than mine do, for instance.

Even Einstein, despite his immense genius, wouldn’t fail to acknowledge the social utility and necessity of all the mathematicians and scholars whose work informed in his own. He certainly wouldn’t express the sentiment “they were doing all that math and physics before I came along anyway.” Quite ironically, he was also a strident socialist, so I doubt he’d disagree with the labor theory of value either.

I used the example of the library cataloging because I think it’s an apt parallel. These systems, invented by librarians for organizing all of the world’s information, prior to the internet, have contributed immense social utility and enabled work that would be otherwise be unimaginable and impossible. But no librarian would claim that Melvil Dewey’s accomplishment was greater than that of all the works that have been catalogued. Page rank itself was derived from measures of academic citation impact scoring by Eugene Garfield, who I likewise imagine would’ve felt the same, despite being a successful entrepreneur on similar terms.

The sort of hubris behind thinking that abstractions of a network are more valuable than the network and its labor itself perhaps explains why libraries remain an incredible resource and Google search gets worse and worse, year after year.

I don't really understand your point. Obviously the whole network is important. Einstein's contributions would not have been possible without the society around him to produce food and shelter, the centuries of mathematics and physics research he built upon, etc..

Nobody is claiming that these people did something completely on their own, or did not draw upon immense wealth created and produced by others. The point is that each individual person's marginal contribution to the global utility function is not equal. Einstein built upon the work of others but the edifice he created is worth more than the one I have created. He increased the social utility function more than me, so we can say that his work is more valuable than mine. This is completely orthogonal to whether or not he had help.

My point is that your conception of individually-oriented social utility is based on hierarchical forms of epistemology that the people you cite themselves did not embrace. It’s a projection of Capitalist logic and forms of valuation that has little to do with how these networks work or form new knowledge.

Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men.

> My point is that your conception of individually-oriented social utility is based on hierarchical forms of epistemology that the people you cite themselves did not embrace. It’s a projection of Capitalist logic and forms of valuation that has little to do with how these networks work or form new knowledge.

Are you rejecting the concept of variation in aggregate utility? I don't think that you need any sort of capitalist epistemology, or hierarchical vision of society to explain the presence of utility variance.

> Identifying individual variations in social utility is less important than furthering the network’s growth and ability to produce further improvements, in aggregate. This is why most serious researchers don’t work in industry and why the business world is dominated by inanity and con men.

Identifying individual variations in utility is how you maximize network growth. That is precisely the reason capitalism is structured the way that it is. Direct resources to people and entities who are growing the network, in proportion to how much they are growing it. That is the distilled essence of capitalism.

> Are you rejecting the concept of variation in aggregate utility? I don't think that you need any sort of capitalist epistemology, or hierarchical vision of society to explain the presence of utility variance.

No, of course there is variance in aggregate utility. It’s what weight that variance is given relative to support of the entire network that determines its ability to produce and further, useful knowledge. Overemphasis on individual contributions and direction of resources to them and away from the overall health of the network results in various forms of gaming and pseudo-novelty. Citation rings and replication crises are obvious examples of this.

>Identifying individual variations in utility is how you maximize network growth. That is precisely the reason capitalism is structured the way that it is. Direct resources to people and entities who are growing the network, in proportion to how much they are growing it. That is the distilled essence of capitalism.

The distilled essence of Capitalism is that people who own Capital accrue more by using it to buy the labor of others, who must concede to this arrangement as a condition of their survival. I expect on this point we’d irreconcilably disagree, so it’s probably best to leave it aside.

Resources in Capitalism, however, are not directed toward people who are growing the network in socially useful or ways that sustain its overall health (including maintaining its diversity), but toward individual nodes or small clusters that pursue their own short term growth for growth’s sake at the expense of the network’s overall health. The externalities of pursuing such growth and the periodic crises it produces are almost never taken into account.

Google is a good example of this because again, they observed a useful signal within a knowledge network and added extra utility in making it available to be easily leveraged by others. But from there, the prioritizing of their own growth deteriorated the network’s overall health, as observed in things like the explosion in various forms of SEO optimization and content mills, surveillance advertising and its malware, foreclosing of the web in services like AMP, and use of its market position to bully competitors and quash innovation independent of them.

> Resources in Capitalism, however, are not directed toward people who are growing the network in socially useful or ways that sustain its overall health (including maintaining its diversity), but toward individual nodes or small clusters that pursue their own short term growth for growth’s sake at the expense of the network’s overall health. The externalities of pursuing such growth and the periodic crises it produces are almost never taken into account.

It seems like your point here is mostly just that capitalism, as currently constructed, is imperfect at directing resources towards productive activities, and I would agree with that. But I think it's extremely hard to argue with how successful capitalism has been at creating network growth. Global utility as measured (imperfectly) by GDP has grown tremendously since the introduction of market capitalism.

I suppose you could argue that capitalism achieved this 'by accident', but i'm not sure whether that matters. The fact is that capitalism has caused huge swathes of the world to be substantially better off than they were before, and promises to do the same for more as time moves forward. Other economic systems have failed to achieve similar kinds of growth, and absent that growth, they simply don't have the ability to raise people out of poverty, no matter how nice their intentions.

> Google is a good example of this because again, they observed a useful signal within a knowledge network and added extra utility in making it available to be easily leveraged by others. But from there, the prioritizing of their own growth deteriorated the network’s overall health, as observed in things like the explosion in various forms of SEO optimization and content mills, surveillance advertising and its malware, foreclosing of the web in services like AMP, and use of its market position to bully competitors and quash innovation independent of them.

Yes, Google has created various forms of waste. But you can't look at a single externality and indict a system with it in isolation. You need to look at the net change in utility. I think it's very hard to argue that Google's net impact on the world was not positive.

I'm not an expert on the labor theory of value, but I do know that's not a valid interpretation of it. For one thing, I believe it applies only at a macro, or sectoral, level.

The point is, the labor theory of value has been rejected by economists for a really long time now, because it's a totally incoherent way of valuing things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theor...

In your view, is there a middle ground between labor theory and corrupt capitalism?

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.)

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.

In that case, why not make suggestions to make the government service better and more efficient instead?

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.

> 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.

Laziness? It’s easier to destroy than to create.

Doesn't that argument apply to all the people wanting to abolish any government agency? eg: Why not make suggestions to make DEA/ICE/NSA/TSA/FDA/CDC/etc better? The same goes for those wanting to defund the police. The answer is clear to anyone whose bugbear I just mentioned. Some believe that some of these government programs can't be fixed. They're harmful on net, and the sooner they're eliminated, the better. I doubt many would agree on that when it comes to the postal service, but the core of the argument is sound.

Anyway, let's look at ways to make USPS more efficient. The pandemic has caused a 30% decrease in shipment volumes. If USPS wants to stay solvent they can furlough employees, lay off employees, and/or increase prices. Postal workers are unionized, so there's little chance of reducing employee expenses. That means they have to raise prices and/or ask for money from the government (which comes from taxes). Trump wants them to increase prices before he'll give them more money. This is because right now, Amazon (along with many other businesses) is shipping tons of packages via USPS. USPS loses money on each package they ship, so this is effectively a transfer from taxpayers to Amazon. Here's Trump quoted by Politico:[1]

> “The post office, if they raised the price of a package by approximately four times, it would be a whole new ballgame,” the president said during the signing ceremony for the latest coronavirus relief package. “But they don’t want to raise it because they don’t want to insult Amazon, and they don’t want to insult other companies, perhaps, that they like. The post office should raise the price of the packages to the companies. Not to the people, to the companies. If they did that, it would be a whole different story.”

Now let's look at the PDF. It mentions that Koch has funded a libertarian advocacy group called Americans for Prosperity. This group has come out against H.R. 6800, which authorizes $3 trillion of spending.[2] Of that, $25 billion goes to USPS.[3] That's less than 1% of the spending in that bill! Perhaps Americans for Prosperity aren't trying to kill the post office. Perhaps they simply don't want the government's budget to grow by another 15% of GDP, especially since much of that is likely directed towards special interests.

The bill also gives another $200 million to pay for salaries of workers in the federal prisons and it gives $187.5 billion to metropolitan areas (this money can't be spent outside of metro areas). Scanning through, I also see some stuff about discouraging the importation of drugs & medical equipment. It's a total mess.[4]

What I think is actually happening is that some people want to get another $3T of spending passed (mostly to enrich their constituents & ensure their re-election). To do this, they're using public support for the postal service (and public disdain for the Kochs) to try and sway voters. It's a sleazy tactic but it often works (as evidenced by how many upvotes this post has).

1. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/24/trump-us-postal-ser...

2. https://americansforprosperity.org/afp-issues-key-vote-alert...

3. https://www.linns.com/news/us-stamps-postal-history/heroes-a...

4. The full text of the bill can be read at https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6800...

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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?

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

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.

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%20...

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.

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.

> 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.

It is the wrong perspective to only view public services as businesses.

I get a say every time I vote.

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

Not much, but that's why I support proportional representation, not turning the world into a Libertarian hellhole.

The same could be said for the never ending and needless military campaigns we're in.

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.

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.

there is no such thing as a free lunch

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.

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?

The analogy isn't appropriate, in my opinion. It's viable to start a new grocery business and consumers can exercise choices in which ones they frequent. These options are not nearly as viable for healthcare (particularly in emergencies or when seeing specialists) or postal services (when serving an area as broad as the US).

True, but the question is always: what level of profit is reasonable? A corporation, absent regulation, will charge as much as the market will bear. If they can charge twice as much but only lose a quarter of their customers, they'll do it. Such a situation with something like water would be a disaster. People would die.

They will not charge as much as the market can bear. They will charge as much as they can without competition eating their market share.

There is no regulation for instance on the cost of soda, but it is not priced as high as the market can bear. Soda is incredibly cheap and requires no government interference to be cheap.

We already have this situation going on in the health care industry. Companies will raise prices as long as profits can be increased. A large amount of the US population can't afford to have access to health care anymore.

Profits are capped, and economists agree that such caps are not helpful.

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe it’s a reference to the 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.

United States v. John C. Gilmore. the supreme court determined it was illegal, and the people providing letter service, which was cheaper than usps, were arrested.

when people say 'mail' they mean what your postman puts in your mailbox. a letter. with a stamp on it. that is what the discussion is about. letting other companies compete on delivering letters. this is the post, this is what has been on the news, this is what 'the billionairs' are pushing for. they already provide parcel service. no one is arguing they should be allowed to start doing what they already do.

you should educate yourself on the point before arguing such a strong strawman. this battle has been going on for over 150 years, and it has nothing to do with parcel service. start here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company

that's what i and the whole country is 'on about.' welcome to the conversation.

you do not pay the rest.

when the cost of his letter is 10x more than he was charged, and the of mine is 10x less than i was charged, i don't pay more? seriously you don't understand? wow.

we go to dinner. you get a side salad, and i get a steak and some wine. we split the bill down the middle. cool? i'm not trying to diss you. i want to be friends with you.

It’s more beneficial to have a flat postage rate that doesn’t price people out of living in certain areas simply due to postage rates. First class mail is an essential service.

it's more be'efitial to have flat rent that doesn't price peoplenout of living in certain cities simly due to housing rates. housing is an essential service.

soo how that works?

locations have different expenses. farms have cheap land. they have expensive delivery cost. taking money from people paying high rent to subsidize farmers is not 'benefitial' to people living in cities. it's benefitial to farmers. how about everyone pay their own expenses, and we don't shuffle around other people's costs. it's not benefitial to me to pay for a farmer getting fifty junk mail catalogs a week.

> it's more be'efitial to have flat rent that doesn't price peoplenout of living in certain cities simly due to housing rates. housing is an essential service.

All first-class letters of 1 oz or less are identical. Housing is not identical, which is why it’s fine to have varying prices for housing. Many places have rent controls in place. The utility of having flat rate letter postage for every citizen outweighs any benefit realized from privatization.

> taking money from people paying high rent to subsidize farmers is not 'benefitial' to people living in cities.

This has been done for quite a while in the US, as crop subsidy payments. People in cities benefit by having stable food prices.

> it's not benefitial to me to pay for a farmer getting fifty junk mail catalogs a week.

You’re not paying for it, hope that helps.

you don't know it's a federal crime for anyone but usps to do letter service. you don't know a company was shut down by the feds for trying. you don't know the whole argument people have been debating now and for the last 150 years is to allow private companies to handle letters.

so you looked it up, saw you were wrong, and changed your argument to 'parcel service' = 'letter service.'

you were given examples of why people want letter service from private companies, and how urban citizens pay for rural letter costs.

your argument at that point us 'you don't pay for it, the money to cover costs comes from a magic place, but if you do, quickthrowman has determined it's worth it, so case closed.'

thank you for the entertainment.

you are bot forced to use the usps, you are not actually using it, so you are not paying the rest.

these sort of imbalances generally disappear in aggregate (sometimes your letter goes to a farm) and/or are worth the simplicity anyway, should you ever choose to take part.

Literally no one else on earth can ship first class mail aside from the USPS. It is a federal crime. The USPS has a government enforced monopoly on the delivery of mail which is why UPS can only deliver packages.

you know litetally nothing about this. we are literally, by law, forced to use usps for letters. this is what people have been fighting against for 150 years. letting private services deliver mail. the last time a company tried this, in 1854 i think, they were shut down for breaking the the law - procecuted by the government.

it's not 'worth the simplicity' to me, living in a high rent city. literally every piece of mail in an urban area is 10x it's actual delivery cost, which pays for the farmer's mail, and him getting all the spam, which actually costs 10x more than he pays. exponentially more people live in cities. every time you get your bank statement delivered in a city, you and 20 others just paid for a single letter to be delivered to a farmer. through shittier interest rates in your savings account. yes, i rarely mail letters. like 10 times a year. and same goes for the 3 million other people in my city. and yet because of low farmland population, urbanites still mail many more total letters vs farmers.

we're not paying for it? whi, pray tell, do you think is paying for that farmer to send a letter? he pays half a dollar for a stamp. the post office spends about $10 to deliver it. my letter costs a penny to deliver. i pay half a dollar too.

so no, it is not 'worth the simplicity' to me, to pay for that farmer. but federal law forces me to.

“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.

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-...

They’re not what we would call charter schools. For example, you can use school vouchers in Sweden for religious education.

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.

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.

> Places like Sweden have school competition via vouchers

This system is also unique in the world and the results since its institution have been woeful. Massive increase in segregation, inflation in grades, bankruptcies where the pupils suddenly doesn't have a school. All because they need to market themselves as "good schools" to make the largest amount of profit.

For the same reasons they tend to establish themselves in places with socioeconomically strong families, since those kids needs less work, and are thus more profitable.

There's also a queue system in-place where the parents must enqueue their child into these "good" schools basically directly after birth. These kind of hidden signals is used to further stratify the pupils through both segregation and class. A government issued report suggested that there should be a draw instead of a queue to prevent these outcomes. This is of course vehemently opposed by the "free-school industry" (yes, ofc they added the "free" prefix).

This system is not something that any country should adopt, and luckily, we're so far unique about it (heard something about Chile (Chicago Boys remember?) but not sure that's still the case). There's a large majority to change this system, but unfortunately the current situation in parliament doesn't allow it.

It’s not unique. More than 2/3 of OECD countries have some sort of school choice. https://www.edchoice.org/engage/faqs/how-does-school-choice-...

> OECD’s reports show that, of the 53 participants, 25 countries’ governments (nine of which have top 20 PISA scores overall) provide vouchers and/or tuition tax credits for students to attend private schools (see accompanied table).

Not combined with state vouchers and for-profit schools.

"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.

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?

I think that's a more complex story. There's a huge amount of government oversight. And health insurance completely obscures the true cost of medical care from the individual consumers so market forces don't really have a chance to work.

Many European countries have largely privatized healthcare providers.

They do, but they also have universal coverage mandates, and pricing regulations.

If you want to mentions specific countries we can compare them to the US.

>So food is really important and vital. Should the government be in charge of growing and distributing food?

It already is. The Food and Drug Administration exists. There are countless laws that dictate everything from how crops are. grown to how animals are treated to how products are labeled. Moreover, the government purchases enormous quantities of food and distributes it for the military as well as being involved in everything from food stamps to the famed "welfare cheese" strategic food reserve issues.

Now, it's true that the government isn't in control of literally every aspect of food distribution, but they definitely do things to ensure a stable food supply for the country at reasonable prices. (And then there are the billions and billions in farmer subsidies etc.)

There are also laws governing the UPS and Fedex. That is not the same as the government being in charge of the delivery of mail.

Except that there are billions in agricultural subsidies and they are (at least intended) to manage the cost of food on store shelves. The government will pay farmers to not grow food to control the supply. The government isn't fully running the show but it's absurd to assert that the government is incapable of everything and that only private business can get the job done!

Especially when you're being entirely disingenuous about your argument. I don't honestly understand how you can truly believe that corporate interests care more about people than the government. Perhaps you also believe that corporations are people, and at that point I guess I'd have to concede. If corporations are people, then they do care about people. It's just the one they care about is themselves.

Not every business is a cartoon mustache twirling villain but it's baffling to me to see the lengths people will go to to both outright dismiss the governments ability to do literally anything, and also that private enterprise can do it better.

Also the major sources of inequalities today go far beyond education, policing, and the justice system. Many of them are inexplicably tied to private enterprise. You don't want the government in charge of growing or distributing food. Well that's great. What's also great is that the cheapest food you can buy is also some of the most unhealthy trash you can put in your body. Soda is cheaper than water.

"which is why killer cops never go to prison but their victims get million dollar damage payments"

Yes, the civil justice system is more private-party focused, but you have conveniently left out why victims obtain judgements in civil courts when cops are not convicted in criminal courts. In civil litigation, a judgement is made based on the preponderance of evidence. In the criminal courts, the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt". It's easier for the plaintiff to win in civil court than for the prosecutor to win in criminal court.

Private/public control is inconsequential when compared to the level of proof required for conviction/judgement.

>you have conveniently left out why victims obtain judgements in civil courts when cops are not convicted in criminal courts

The primary issue is qualified immunity, coupled with the DA needing to rely on cops to do their jobs, leading to a massive conflict of interest. Unless the exact circumstances in one case occurred previously (and it was explicitly ruled illegal), a cop is let off due to the way qualified immunity works.

If a cop faced the same criminal trial as a regular citizen, they would very likely go to jail as most cases that go to trial result in a conviction.

The market can be effective, and it can be especially effective for people with money.

However, it should be noted that some people, possibly even MANY people...do not have money or have limited money that must be allocated to stop death in one form or another. The market does not have a solution for them because they are not participants in the market. Yet they exist as a rather defined part of objective reality.

Privatization is charming and all, but it is not an end all, be all to the ills of mankind.

Getting rid of public schools would just make things even more unequal. Poor parents would be simply unable to pay enough for decent education for their kids.

> 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.

I assume you're referencing famines in communist countries, etc. In those instances, the government had a monopoly on food growth and distribution.

Your example is irrelevant because the USPS is just one of numerous mail carriers (UPS, FedEx, etc).

The USPS has a monopoly on first class mail delivery. This is why UPS doesn't leave letters in your mailbox.

I think we can find quite a few examples, though, of things that are privatized but are horribly inefficient in the US (and are done much better in other countries). Healthcare is the primary example that comes to mind.

And I'm honestly not sure where all the USPS hate comes from: I think they actually provide pretty damn great service[0], at a pretty damn great price. Their financial struggles are mainly due to Congress heaping unreasonable financial obligations on them (obligations that companies like FedEx or UPS would never have). I don't think I could say they're objectively superior to the private couriers, but they're not objectively inferior either.

You mention education, and the issues there mainly boil down to lack of funding. The US spends a pittance per student compared to countries with much better public education. You could say ok, well, that's just proof that the government can't manage education well. And I guess that's maybe not false, but consider that a big reason why education isn't funded properly in the US is because of people (like Betsey DeVos) who want to kill public education, not because they truly believe the private sector can do it better, but because doing so will enrich their cronies. Regardless, you could flip it around and say that the US's public education is amazing considering how under attack its very existence is.

> the tort system, which is partly under private control

Not sure I understand what you mean. In a civil trial, you still have the same lawyers represent you, and you get the same public-servant judges, etc. The state's word is final when a judgment is rendered.

And in fact we do know what happens in civil matters when we try to privatize it: arbitration (often binding, because god forbid we disallow that), which is hardly a paragon of fairness or equality.

> ... is far more fair than the criminal justice system that is under public control

I don't think this is an argument about public vs. private, though. Yes, in a criminal trial, the prosecution has many, many tools available to them that a plaintiff in a civil trial wouldn't have, in the form of whatever law enforcement apparatus is at hand to help gather evidence and find witness testimony (and perhaps other nefarious things that they're in a unique position to get away with). But there's really no other option; you just can't treat criminal cases in the same way you treat civil cases.

There's a ton of inequality in our judicial system, but that has nothing to do with the public-sector private-sector dichotomy. In a civil matter, the state is a mostly-disinterested party, while in a criminal matter, the state has an inherent interest.

> which is why killer cops never go to prison but their victims get million dollar damage payments

No, that's because criminal proceedings have a much higher evidentiary standard. Which is how it should be, because the result of a criminal proceeding can deprive someone of their freedom or life.

[0] Two nice things the USPS does that the private couriers don't: pick up mail and packages from my building for free, and keep a key to my condo building so I don't have to be available to let them in.

>I'm honestly not sure where all the USPS hate comes from:

I don't hate the USPS. I think it's mistake.

>You mention education, and the issues there mainly boil down to lack of funding.

Please spare me. The US spends an average of $15,400 per year per kid, which is an enormous cost. In NYC, it's even higher than this, yet their test scores and grades are worse than say Utah where the the cost is $5k per year per kid. Funding has, past an extremely basic level, no bearing on child academic performance whatsoever.

>Not sure I understand what you mean. In a civil trial, you still have the same lawyers represent you, and you get the same public-servant judges, etc. The state's word is final when a judgment is rendered.

In a criminal trial, only one party can file charges to begin with. The state. In a civil trial, anyone can file charges. Even after trial the inequality persists, which is why Roger Stone won't have to serve his full prison sentence. In a civil trial, the president/governor/mayor cannot pardon because he is not a party to the trial.

>In a civil matter, the state is a mostly-disinterested party

It is not a party, full stop. This is the advantage to the tort system.

>No, that's because criminal proceedings have a much higher evidentiary standard.

It's because the state simply chooses not to charge. Which is why the Director of National Intelligence did not get tried for committing perjury, and why Donald Trump hasn't been indicted with treason, and why it took Minneapolis to burn before Chauvin got charged with anything. The state has total control over criminal proceedings which is an enormous source of inequality.

> 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.

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.

UPS, FedEx, DHL, all exist and make money.

They also foist last-mile delivery off on the USPS when they can’t be arsed to do it their damn selves, probably because it’s cheaper to leave small packages at the post office than drive a truck of their own a couple miles out of their way to drop one package.

Source: FedEx does this to us all the damned time. UPS generally delivers to our door in a brown truck. I don’t know about DHL.

Let’s not pretend that other couriers offer the same service as the USPS (specifically universal service) in a competitive market while also turning a profit.

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.

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.

The postal service lost my passport that I sent first class tracked to an embassy in order to get a visa shortly before I was due to leave overseas for an extended period of time. It was marked as delivered, but never was according to the embassy. After hours of phone calls and hold time, the USPS admitted that it had been redirected to a lost mail facility in a city 800 miles away from its destination on accident. It is still sitting in that lost mail facility according to the USPS all these years later. I had to call my congressman's office to push the state department to get me a new passport expedited so that I could get my visa in time before I had to leave. Huge headache.

They've lost plenty of other things besides. I once sent $100 cash in a fun colored envelope containing a birthday card. The card arrived scotch-taped closed with the money gone. I know it wasn't an accident where it got ripped open by a conveyor belt or something because they re-seal torn envelopes in a plastic bag when that happens. That was more an annoying than headache inducing, but UPS has never caused problems for me like those and I use them by an order of magnitude more than USPS.

The worst part isn't that those things happen. Theft and accidents can happen anywhere. The worst part is that the USPS takes no responsibility and could not care any less. So what if a postal employee stole money from a birthday card? Sucks to be me. I can't send letters any other way. The USPS has a legally protected monopoly on letter delivery. So what if the hold time is 9 hours? Who else am I going to go to? The post office is built on bureaucracy and you and I pay the price for it.

Taxes don't fund the USPS, postage does.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

I didn't mention public vs private. This isn't what the debate is about, although telling that you brought it up unprompted, because most of these programs are government funded and are not private schools (there have been programs where public students are funded to attend private schools...these existed decades ago, and are not anything like today's programs...those did work too though btw, it just wasn't possible to do this at scale). The issue is introducing competition (and btw, this isn't a left/right issue either...in the 90/2000s almost every left-wing govt moved in this direction...it is amazing how quickly people forget things that were common knowledge in the recent past).

The socioeconomic situation in the US isn't poor. It is tragic that someone thinks this but I would suggest leaving the US for a few days. Suggesting that schools are there to prevent some kind of public health catastrophe is ludicrous. The irony of incredible fortune is being unable to understand that you are fortunate.

> this isn't a left/right issue either...in the 90/2000s almost every left-wing govt moved in this direction...

True, and yet as someone who is extremely liberal on social issues and cannot possibly find a home on the right, I still feel uncomfortable among many on the left who don't worry as I do about the potential for stagnation in the absence of competition. It's different than it was back in the 80s but there is still a divide.

> the people teaching them can usually kick back in a unionised job

I agree with most of what you say about competition and I wanted to upvote, but this dig at unionized teachers really makes me angry.

Many, many teachers are extremely highly motivated because they love the students they see every day and cannot stand to do any less than their best for them.

The existence of billionaires is far more harmful to competition than government is.

How? How can a billionaire prevent competition without siccing the government on them through tariffs, regulatory hurdles, licenses, etc...

Artifically low prices, endless and expensive litigation (unless you count that as government siccing), corporate espionage, bribery, acquisition, extortion, etc.

Is it really that hard to think of what you could do with a coporate money and know government intervention?

If your answer the question of how being a billionaire leads to monopoly is 'crime', I'll have you know that that can be done independent of billionaire status.

A billion ways.

Here's just one: run at a loss until your competition is driven out of business. Then raise prices once you're a monopoly again. (This isn't a hypothetical either, but a standard practice.)

This doesn't work. You can cut prices and lose money until the upstart firms go out of business, but you cannot raise them afterwards or guess what will happen?

Potential upstarts can't get funding to start their business, because investors know you'll just bully them back out of the market.

Unless they find another billionaire with pockets as deep as yours, and a willingness to wage a price war for years.

You'll become Walmart?

Walmart has low prices on everything. If they are charging monopoly prices, why is their margin 3%?

Buying up all the land that contains a particular resource then guarding it, thus permanently locking said resource away is one way to monopolize a market vertical.

If there had ever been such a person, even once, it seems like we'd be celebrating them today. If you could send a guy back 200 years to keep all the coal in the ground, you'd do it.

There are very few that will celebrate De Beers implementation of this monopoly business model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Legal_issues

De Beers does not have a monopoly. Look up their market share.

They had an effective monopoly, until their control of supply was broken: http://www.paulzimnisky.com/a-brief-history-of-de-beers

By market forces. Competition, when permitted to exist, produces net benefits.

What does this have to do with billionaires? Everyone does from private citizens to governments do this, and land itself has value whether there are resources are not.

Can you give me one example of a billionaire doing this?

They can finance the dumping of product at below market rates until they run the competition out of business, then corner the market for themselves.

You cannot corner a market through price dumping. You can lose money until the newer firm dies, but once you raise prices again, guess what happens? The Baltimore Gas Company is a famous example of this. They didn't establish their monopoly until the maryland legislature enforced a utility charter that granted them the exclusive right to distribute gas in Baltimore.

I would disagree. Billionaires and mega companies are able to pioneer and validate ideas that smaller companies may not be able to due to financial or operational restraints.

But once an idea is validated smaller competitors come in and start picking off verticals. Shopify and it’s 100,000+ stores are around in large part due to Amazon not only validating and producing best practices for the e-commerce model but also in building the foundational infrastructure (AWS) for smaller companies to leverage.

There are major benefits to having mega companies and billionaires around, and particularly having them in your country. Albeit, I agree, we do need to come up with a better tax strategy for the ultra wealthy.

> I would disagree. Billionaires and mega companies are able to pioneer and validate ideas that smaller companies may not be able to due to financial or operational restraints.

Sorry, you mean that billionaires and megacorps are able to profit off of ideas pioneered and validated by publically-funded research institutes? I don't see how their inability to do so would be a loss to society.

What would be your idea to ensure scaled, cost-effective production of the ideas that come from these institutions?

And we can’t consider an idea validated until it is brought to market.

> And we can’t consider an idea validated until it is brought to market.

I see you've designed your test to guarantee the result you want.

You don’t billionaires to validate new ideas, and amazon was not started by a billionaire . Billionaires rarely If ever have created a brand new industry or idea to fruition

A billion dollar market is not the same a billionaire . You need the former you don’t need the later .

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).

I don't understand what this Whataboutism has to do with the topic at hand.

You’re commenting like you won, but everyone else is just confused what your original point was.

I don’t know too many billionaires who can have me arrested and incarcerated for the rest of my life.

I guess you just know the wrong (right?) billionaires.

It’s not silly at all. I’m far more afraid of the government who has the power to lock me up for the rest of my life (as has the system set up to do so) than some random billionaire.

I dont think the problem with the Kochs is their tunnel vision.

It’s not just “they.” Postal privatization is common, and subsidies are closely watched: 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.

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.

Yes but ideological means tt's a systemic crippling of government pillars in order to collapse the federal government or otherwise render it inept.