Yes, and that makes it even worse. They’re so out of touch with common people and so insulated from routine everyday life, their opinion shouldn’t count for anything.
I don’t care if joe programmer on HN or Jeff the General Contractor at the bar are advocating for dismantling the post office because of libertarian ideology, because they have neither the power nor resources to affect change.
I do care when insanely wealthy billionaires who are completely insulated from the rest of society argue for horseshit like this because they have power to change it, and it’s for ideological reasons.
It’s pure narcissism to argue for a position that would negatively affect millions of people when the one arguing for change wouldn’t suffer one damn bit and in effect disregard everyone else’s suffering for their ideological bullshit position.
The existence of billionaires combined with Citizens United is an actual problem, the post office is not.
Allowing individuals to accumulate so much wealth is just not good for the common people, and the fact that our government is so inept at managing money isn't a good enough reason to allow individuals to reach such power and wealth. If they are allowed to accumulate such wealth, there should be much stronger laws preventing their influence in government policies.
The USPS is damn good at delivering the mail, I don’t trust any private company to treat a first-class letter with the care the USPS generally does.
The Post Office actually makes money, but they’re legally required to fund a new hire’s entire projected pension at the time of hiring which lets Republicans point at how the post office loses money when it was done that way on purpose.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
>"FACT: ALL companies are required to fund any pension promises they make to their employees. (The only exceptions are for top executives, who can lose their pensions if a company goes bankrupt, and for entities that aren’t actually “companies” - state and local governments and churches.) NONE of them are permitted to take a “pay as you go” approach but must contribute to a pension fund an amount equivalent to what a worker has accrued that year in benefit promises, regardless of how far into the future that worker will be retiring, and must make up for any shortfalls due to asset losses or other reasons. The USPS and private sector companies use the same general actuarial principles to do so, though there are differences in assumptions, particulars of the calculations, etc."
Companies need to fund their pension plans, but only for the portion of time the worker has been employed by them. For example, for FY 2020, the company needs to set aside money corresponding to an additional year of work. But for the USPS, the law requires it to set aside money assuming that the worker will work his entire career for USPS, and project all retirement costs 75 years into the future, even for workers that they haven't even hired yet. In actuary, this is the difference between "actual vested liability", and "total projected liability". The result is clearly absurd. Moreover, this money is not staying in USPS retirement accounts, is going to the government. So it doesn't even guarantee that the money will be there for USPS workers. To add to the injury, USPS is allowed only to invest on treasury bonds, which means that they need to raise even more money than a private company, which is free to invest in any high grade bond.
https://www.businessinsider.com/usps-rise-fall-post-office-c...
The USPS is required to pre-pay the pension costs they have incurred. It's not pre-paying the retirement fund for 75 years. It's putting money aside so that you have the money to pay your 25 year old worker the money you promised them when they're 100.
"[the law] required the post office to calculate all of its retiree pension and healthcare costs for the next 75 years, including for people it hadn't even hired yet, and put away enough over the next 10 years to cover them. To put this in perspective, that'd be like you only working from age 18 to 28 and then expecting to live on that income until you were 103 years old."
>“[T]he PAEA required the Postal Service to calculate all of its likely pension costs over the next 75 years, and then sock away enough money between 2007 and 2016 to cover most of them.” The Week, April 16, 2018.
>FACT: the actuarial valuation methods used by the USPS are based only on accruals attributed to past service, no different than any other such valuation.
>The Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund (PSRHBF) is a USPS-specific fund, and its 10-K report specifies that it uses the “aggregate entry age normal acturarial cost method.” For pension benefits, employees participate in the CSRS and FERS general civil servant pensions, using the same method. In this method, yes, the actuary calculates the value of all benefits to be paid out in the future, due to past and future service, and then subtracts out the value of the future accruals, to calculate the actuarial liability. In addition, the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund calculates a projection of liabilities 75 years into the future in its annual report, but this does not mean that 75 years’ worth of future accruals are advance-funded, only that the long-term sustainability of the system is measured over a 75-year period.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
> In this method, yes, the actuary calculates the value of all benefits to be paid out in the future, due to past and future service, and then subtracts out the value of the future accruals, to calculate the actuarial liability.
I.e., the USPS has to raise the money to fund liabilities for 75 years, and it had to do so in 10 years, which essentially meant that they had to operate in the red making its financial situation even more complicated.
Your cite says they had to put aside money for all their pension costs over the next 75 years. Including people they haven't even hired yet.
My cite says that they had to calculate pension costs payable over the next 75 years that they already incurred. That's a much smaller number and matches the requirements for private companies.
You can find the explanation in several articles, for example:
"[the law] requires the self-supporting U.S. Postal Service, which receives not one dime in taxpayer subsidies, to fully fund its retirees’ health benefits for 75 years into the future. It also requires that money be set aside over a 10-year period, at a rate of more than $5 billion per year.
That means the postal service is now paying for the future health care of retirees it has not yet hired, and who in some cases have not yet been born. No other public or private company in the nation bears any kind of financial burden like that.
Even worse, none of that money is truly being set aside. Instead, it is going directly into the U.S. government’s general fund, and it’s being spent on current government operations. The set-aside is a theoretical accounting gimmick. Those future retirement liabilities are actually being added to the national debt."
https://roanoke.com/news/local/casey-the-most-insane-law-by-...
Because pensions go up with years of service you have to account for the worker continuing to work when calculating pension liability. As an example, say a pension vests after 5 years. What should the pension cost be for an employee in year 2? The best answer is something like 1/5 of the NPV of their pension.
That's what they mean by "benefits to be paid out... due to .. future service".
>That means the postal service is now paying for the future health care of retirees it has not yet hired,
Did you not see the part of my cite where that is specifically called a myth?
?
Did you not read my post where it said:
> The best answer is something like 1/5 of the NPV of their pension.
Of course nobody is required to pay the entire NPV of the pension today. For an employee that is retiring in 30 years they are required to pay 1/30th of the NPV of their pension each year. That's what the USPS is required to do. They're not being required to pay the entire cost of their employee pensions up front.
1: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/... (page 26)
That hasn’t been my experience in the least. Terrible customer service, packages lost, packages requiring signatures left on door step.
And the best is when my package says “delivered” yet shows up 3 days later.
Are you kidding? They're all the markets nobody talks about because they're working.
Go to the store and buy a chair. There are a hundred different kinds. Any kind you like. The barrier to entry is low. There are many competitors.
> The Post Office actually makes money
The problem with the Post Office isn't that they don't make money (though having to be bailed out by the taxpayer is unacceptable for any reason, and the pension thing was at the behest of the USPS union rather than the Republicans). The problem with it is that they have a monopoly on carrying mail which prevents customers from enjoying the benefits of competition.
I was operating under the assumption that a market that has tariffs on foreign goods [0] is not ‘truly free’ but perhaps you disagree.
[0] https://myhfa.org/tariff-relief-doesnt-apply-to-furniture-fr...
> USPS problem is a lack of competition
Do you expect a private company to service every single rural address that currently receives mail for the same or lower price? We can’t even get ISPs to wire the entire country.
But now you're just being pedantic. You could make the same argument about taxes, where some states have higher property taxes so factories there have a competitive disadvantage and so on. But then you can't even make the same claim of black markets because their illegality increases costs.
In practice what matters is not whether there is some kind of ideologically pure anarchist vision of freedom which requires no government to exist anywhere in the world, but rather whether there exists competition sufficient to keep margins thin and make companies responsive to customer demands. Which there is, for things like chairs. Some might even say for things like package delivery.
> Do you expect a private company to service every single rural address that currently receives mail for the same or lower price?
They would surely provide service to every address at a price which pays their costs and a market rate of return. Whether that's lower than the existing price in every single case whatsoever doesn't seem like a very strong argument to hinge the entire existence of the USPS on. Especially when there isn't any obvious reason why that subsidy should be a moral imperative, or if it somehow was why it couldn't be satisfied with an explicit subsidy rather than operating an entire national business as a monopoly just to create an implicit one.
> We can’t even get ISPs to wire the entire country.
The incumbents that have captured the regulators? Of course not. And they've had regulations put into place to keep anyone else from doing it either.
Meanwhile, Starlink.
I don't quite understand why that's something we need to do. Those that live in rural addresses that can't be efficiently delivered to can pick up their mail in town. Sure, it's less convenient but lack of conveniences is part of living in the country.
I’ll take the bait and offer you my position on green energy. My employer performs alternative energy work, so that part would make me feel good, but I don’t have a strong left position on energy. I’m fine with nuclear, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro for generating electricity. I believe reducing the amount of coal we use is generally a good thing. That about sums it up.
> Dangerous path there, buddy.
Their opinion should count as much as any regular person. I’m not arguing for silencing anyone, merely limiting their outsized influence. I should’ve clarified this in my original post.
How would privatizing the mail help the poor? I’m curious.
Removing money from politics is a good thing but I’m wary of outright saying certain people don’t matter. That doesn’t lead anywhere good.
I’m arguing in favor of a system that everyone can access for a low cost, a service one could rightly consider essential.
Why should you should listen to me (or any other poster in this thread arguing in favor of keeping the status quo postal system) instead of the Koch brothers? I take the needs of everyone into consideration when formulating my argument instead of ideological or profit motives. Do you think it would be beneficial to the nation to saddle poor rural people with mail rates 10-50x what they are now when we have a perfectly functional system? I don’t, because it screws over the least fortunate to benefit.. who? It literally does not affect me if I have to pay .55 to mail a letter, but someone living on $700/mo that needs to use the private mail to mail a $10 letter will absolutely notice. Why destroy a functional and equitable system just so rich people in cities can pay less for postage? It’s not practical or fair.
I also clarified my position on the influence of billionaires and their opinions: They shouldn’t be ignored completely, but they should not be allowed to have the massive outsized influence they currently enjoy. Their opinion should count no more or less than anyone else.
Genuinely believing something is good on the part of a billionaire has no bearing on whether or not their vote should count once per human or once per dollar.
Genuine belief does not excuse reality blindness or intellectual stop points.
I genuinely believe the world would have so many fewer problems if people would just stop being dicks.
Alas, I am neither justified nor reasonable to present that as an answer to every problem. I have to stop, consider the details of what is there, the history of the edifice, the use case it fulfills, the fact the existence of the service is guaranteed by the Constitution, and that if you want it changed, it's going to take a Constitutional Convention, plus a 2/3's ratification amongst the States. If I want what I consider a problematic piece of the infrastructure of the United States of America to go away, I must come to terms with reality.
>>The existence of billionaires combined with Citizens United is an actual problem, the post office is not.
I'd qualify that with "the existence of billionaires [where large chunks of the capital flowing through them is not cycling back through the country via taxes] is a large threat to the country". Citizen's United alone is a bloody travesty against the very fabric of civic interaction, as a legal fiction by definition skews the equation away from all votes being equal; particularly when media exposure and marketing becomes more important in the act of campaigning than actually knowing what it is your Constituent's actually want, and the fact it is only management who gets to direct the support or capital of the legal fiction with no regard to wishes of the workers (in the case of a corporation directly) or well, workers again, in that it is infrequently seen that wages have gone up in anywhere near the proportion of income/revenue of corporate entities has. Therefore, it is rather obvious that value is likely being tied up in corporate or capital-gains tax write-offs in the forms of donations to possibly independent, yet aligned PAC's.
>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
I realize that's the polite response, but for whatever reason, it has just always rung as condescending to me. I prefer a heartfelt "I disagree", or "I beg to differ;" but to each their own. Would still debate with over a beer or two.
So while in theory I agree with your premise that they are allowed to lobby for whatever they want, the reality is that their influence on society is way overboard and should be limited (limited political contributions!).
Why would I care about Koch's views towards government?
Would I ask Harvey Weinstein about sexual assault and harassment?
Would I ask a creationist about evolution?
Would I ask a pro-lifer about women's reproductive rights?
Would I ask an Iowan farmer about agricultural subsidies?
Would I ask Coca Cola about diabetes?
Would I ask a reality TV star about presidential powers?
Would I ask Rupert Murdock about journalism?
Would I ask The Sinclair Group about media consolidation?
Would I ask a white supremacist about race relations?
Would I ask members of John Birch Society about voting rights?
Would I ask members of The Federalist Society about balance of powers?
Generally it seems like they think that minimal government leads to better results in a social Darwinism or "get rid of the parasites" sense.
I've also never really seen them seriously recon with the question of what you do with people who cannot compete, and at some point I feel like that crosses the line into intellectual negligence.
Again, I don't want to try to demonize the other side and I really wish I could think of a good example, but I really cannot.
It absolutely is intellectual negligence, and there's nothing wrong with pointing it out. The standard answer trotted out is "charity" which is disingenuous at best, and completely impractical at worst.
There's nothing wrong with pointing out the logical flaws of people who secretly wish they were feudal lords or a pater familias in Ancient Rome, and wildly overestimate what their position or level of success in a theoretical 'Libertarian Society' would be.
Just to be clear, we don't have any problem with schools or libraries. We just think the model of having governments collect taxes and then pay for those things is broken. In consequentialist terms, it's broken because it removes competition from the equation, and competition generally leads to progressively improving products and services, and/or lower cost goods and services. In deontological terms, it's broken because taxation is theft.
And that notion is what many of us reject.
To argue otherwise requires a fundamental rejection of the legitimacy of the state
Not exactly, although plenty of Libertarians do reject the legitimacy of the State out of hand. I find the issue to be more nuanced than that. If you hold, as Bastiat did, that "the law" (aka "the State") can be something like - but no more than - the "collective extension to our individual right to self defense" and that no mere aggregation of individuals can have a right to do anything that a single individual doesn't have a right to do, then you can conceptualize a State that does things like, say, protecting private property, but which can't lawfully require payment of taxes.
All of that said, I didn't come here to write pages and pages on political theory. There are entire books that treat this entire topic much better than I could. I'd refer anybody who is interested in this to The Law [2]by Bastiat, as well as the works of Lysander Spooner[2] among others.
You can only do that for the specific case if you believe that either (1) the specific concrete details of property rights are matters of self-evident and immutable natural law, not contextual judgements that involve a balancing of interests, or (2) each individual is empowered to define and impose their version of property rights on others. Otherwise, a state with no power that isn't exactly that held by individuals comprising the state cannot define property laws, much less enforce them. (Technically, it can't define property laws in the first case, either, but it can recognize the concrete and specific elements of, and enforce, the laws that were carved on stone tablets by the invisible hand.)
Also, Lysander Spooner literally is against private property. He was part of the Socialist Internationale. The validity of his rejection of the state on basis of unjustified hierarchy also led to his rejection of capitalism on grounds of unjustified hierarchy. Instead, he was a mutualist. You know, the political economy for which one of it's foundational texts is What is property, which coined the slogan : "La propriété, c'est le vol", by Proudhon.
Bastiat attempted to use this essentially anarchist analysis of the state, but exempt private property from it by inventing some weird standard of government action that has no deeper justification and is pretty much axiomatic.
This is a huge simplification, but if you want more detail you can read "Why Anarcho-capitalism is not Anarchism" either on the Anarchist Library or, if you use Debian, via apt-get install anarchism.
As for Spooner: I am not saying I agree with his analysis on everything (same for Bastiat as far as that goes). I'm just pointing out that those two represent some useful sources of thought on the illegitimacy of the State. That was intended mainly for people who weren't already involved in studying this particular issue.
The question of "what is property" is an interesting and fundamental one for sure. I'm still chewing on that, honestly. Some days I think I know, other days I'm convinced I was wrong before. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If you have to axiomatically state that private property is good and government is bad, then I don't really see why anyone would have to follow your arguments, because not only are such axioms ridiculous, as seen by the attempt to create a rationalization for it. If the argument according to which the state is illegitimate has as a consequence that so is private property, but you still axiomatically state that private property is legitimate, you've also invalidated the original argument that the state is illegitimate, and now your entire worldview is based on two absurd axioms, and not any logic.
A moral philosophy or political economy is only ever valid and worthwhile if it is based on axioms/values that the rest of society share. For example - negative freedom is good, positive freedom is good, prosperity is good, and so on, which you'll find that people tend to agree with inherently. I don't think that there's anyone for which "private property is good" and "the state is bad" is an axiom.
But have you considered that they _genuinely_ belive that minimal government and more privatization leads to overall better results? It might just be that they have good intensions, that they really wish for a better outcome for all.
I don't share that view, but i do think that there is a fraction of hardcore liberterians that truly believe we'd be better of without many of the government-founded services such as libraries, schools etc. - and while i do not agree with that, those people are still entitled to their opinion and are allowed to lobby for it.