I came here to say this. I grew up in an extremely rural area. It's still extremely rural, forty years after I move away. When I was a teenager there was one grocery store, no department stores, no electronics stores, no restaurants. Just the grocery store, the feed store, the auto parts and hunting goods store, and mile upon mile of pasture.

And the post office. The mail came every day. Sending a letter to anywhere cost $0.25, just like your were mailing it from New York City. It was, literally, a lifeline.

This is the critical piece. It's provided as a government service to absolutely _everyone_, for a low price. Like you said, the fact that you can send a letter to any US state or territory for the same price, and it gets there in a few days, is a miracle, and arguably one of the remaining functioning bits of American government. What happens to people in small towns who rely on the mail for prescriptions? Or important paperwork? "Sorry, ma'am, but since the post office was privatized, we'll need an extra $30 to deliver your insulin. But if you subscribe to our Super Shipper Preferred program, you can save 10%..." Imagine losing all connection to the outside world because your city wasn't deemed profitable enough. That's some Gilded Age hell right there.

I live in a rural area. The nearest USPS delivery is at a post office 11 miles away. UPS and FedEx deliver to my front door. It has been the same in two other rural areas I've lived in. New Mexico, California and Arizona. I've never lived in a place that USPS delivered to that UPS and FedEx did not.

UPS and Fedex can be 3x the price to deliver to remote areas. I work for e-commerce company and we ship Usps to certain zip codes with USPS. I am sure USPS loses money on these shipments especially to Alaska where the surcharge can be up to $30 with UPS.

Anecdata is not data.

If USPS didn't exist, do you think FedEx start delivering to those places?

Possibly, but at astronomical rates. But almost certainly not, if they were well out of their routes or extremely far-flung, because there would be no ROI and private entities exist exclusively to generate profit. The postal service is a constitutional public service to benefit our citizens.

Those high rates for delivering to faraway locations are because it is costly to deliver to those places.

It is often useful to require individuals pay for services they consume -- and for that payment to reflect the cost of the service.

What is the benefit gained by socializing the cost of remote deliveries instead of linking the price with the cost?

True, USPS also subsidizes inefficient, environmentally unfriendly living.