In light of this new budgetary crisis created entirely by private business one of their attempts to generate revenue was to sell merch. For a short time you could buy an Official USPS Outfit Dog Costume for example, and it was actually working. Republicans saw them doing that and passed regulation saying no you can’t sell merch or do anything outside delivering mail.
The post master general at the time said fine, if we can’t raise money other ways then we need to raise rates. Guess what republicans did. They told them to piss off. After kneecapping the usps they just pointed at them and used them as an example of bad government which they themselves caused. Classic “starving the beast”
The narrative republicans have around government inefficiency is either wrong or entirely self inflicted. The USPS is just my favorite example.
And if the republicans actually cared they’d propose alternatives and be active in the legislative process with an intent on servicing the “average” American. Trying to ban municipalities federally does nothing but obstruct and protect their corporate funders. That is unacceptable
Try arguing with what people actually say instead of making a strawman of some Facebook meme.
if it's self inflicted, then it's not wrong. the fact that they can hamstring important services/bills for purely political reasons and still get away with it at the polls is a great example of how perverse incentives in government lead to mismanagement. if you want to persuade me that X government service will be run efficiently, you need to first convince me that a certain mainstream party will not be able to sabotage it.
The Democrats could just let the post office be privatised then run their own, on the side, out of to the Democrat HQ. It'd give them an electoral edge delivering pamphlets too.
The reason they can't do this is because the post office, fundamentally and inescapably, doesn't generate enough revenue to justify running it the way they want to. The Democrat voters don't want to bear the cost of the service they want. And the Republicans have noticed this.
I grew up (and still live and work) in a forever-red conservative state. My dad was a glutton for conservative political news, so I grew up immersed in Fox News, Hot Air, Instapundit, Glenn Beck, Drudge Report, you name it. I'm still surrounded by conservative commentary, both educated and ignorant, at every social function I attend.
In all my years of exposure to conservative thought, I have not once read or heard someone say that their concern with the government doing a task is that they'll do it too well. Where do you hear it?
The problem Republicans (in general) have with government-run businesses is not that they operate at a lower cost and so thwart competition, but that they seem to operate at a lower cost because they run on tax dollars rather than on paying customers. Combine that with the fact that the government is not incentivized to make the business profitable and you have a lot of wasted resources used to provide a service that isn't any good but is so cheap to the end user (not to the taxpayer) that it's impossible to compete.
Whether this model of government-run systems is accurate is open to debate, but it's not helpful to set up straw men.