When companies get big enough to serve the entire nation, a few million USD in fines won't make them stop.
> But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?
It's an intrinsic goal, set by those who truly do want to serve better. You can hire for that. USPS would have an easier time hiring the right people if they weren't hamstrung by billionaires weakening their foundations.
True. Intentional dismantling of an organization that can’t protect itself seems slightly out of bounds. However, that’s exactly what you would do in the private sector.
But regardless, people are driven by incentive. Appealing to humans with the notion of doing good but not being paid market price (through monetary or other tangible means) is ensuring that you will not attract top talent. You can trace it all the way back down through the evolutionary rabbit hole: incentive = security = procreation = genes that carry on.
That’s our basic human programming.
We should ensure access to a level playing field but we shouldn’t ignore our basic nature when constructing it.
For example, current day drones would excel at rural mail delivery. Bread and butter business opportunity for someone so inclined.
Just because one method is removed does not mean the product ceases to exist. If it’s valuable a provider will find it.
And some day you may ask why wealth should be a barrier to entry to anything.
The idea of privatization and inclusion are not mutually exclusive.
This fostering competition business is often a false narrative. If the USPS was dissolved, there would be hardly anything compelling UPS or FedEx to pick up its services. If they did, they'd be at an increased cost to consumers.
> Just because the USPS works as is does not mean it couldn’t be better.
In my original comment, I explicitly said "The USPS could be improved but struggles primarily due to active efforts to kill it off. But it's a wonderful idea of a service that definitely should exist and be improved." The problem is that the USPS is in a chokehold by politicians, starving it of funds and increasing its costs, yelling at it "why can't you do better?" Talk about "fair" competition. Of course public services should be improved.
> But the more we keep failing at things like public schools the more I’m inclined to align with privatization.
As I mentioned in my original comment, we should focus on improving these things. Public schools are poor for a variety of reasons, primarily political, and their problems are not inherent to their existence as a public service. My mom was a teacher for decades, as were her family members. I've seen why schools struggle, and it's not simply because they're a public service.
> But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?
What is UPS or FedEx's or any other company's incentive to do better? More capital and more money. Their incentive isn't to make people's lives better. It's to earn more money. It just so happens that these can overlap, but company's have few incentives to provide services to people. That's the entire point of public services. It's because there isn't an incentive for companies to provide them in a way that's beneficial and cost effective for the common people.
If it is failing, which it is not, it is for the same political reasons as the USPS is “failing”, which it is not.
Now some of that is a familial issue but not all of it.
Has public schooling been a net positive? Oh wow yes, by many miles. Could it be better? By many miles, yes.
Saying it could be better does not negate past contributions.
Regulation doesn’t seem to have helped in terms of bang for buck.
See: Health insurance industry
Also see: Internet service providers
Also also see: Publishing
We need to do better on healthcare. However I think we can all agree, the complexities of healthcare are far from those of the postal service.
ISPs are constantly under threat of new players, see SpaceX. The only way they can stick around is by adding value to their products. When was the last time you couldn’t get on the internet by two or more means? Cell phone and WiFi are almost always.
Publishing in particular though, this one doesn’t hold water. At no point in history has it ever been 1) easier to publish but also 2) easier to gain a audience. Publishing is fully democratized due to permissionless platforms enabled via the internet.
Just because the USPS works as is does not mean it couldn’t be better. This is a classic “I like things the way they are” problem. Where the other possibilities are unknown and inexperienced and so are not given equal weight to a decision.
I don’t particularly care whether the postal service is privatized or not. But the more we keep failing at things like public schools the more I’m inclined to align with privatization. Everything can be regulated to a degree that requires basic service levels.
But you can’t fake incentive. What is the USPS incentive to do better?