The USPS is required to deliver to everyone, even when it doesn't make monetary sense to do so. They are an important piece of US infrastructure.

They are also incredibly constrained by legislation. They aren't allowed to just raise prices as needed.

> The agency is burdened by hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and falling revenue, and Congress and the White House have signaled an unwillingness to grant more funding without major restructuring, lawmakers say.

> The law envisioned the Postal Service as a self-sustaining agency whose revenue could cover the expenses associated with an aging workforce involved in a physical occupation: delivering packages and parcels to every address in the country.

> Not even two decades later, it can’t. The Postal Service has racked up $160.9 billion in debt from what’s owed prepaying retiree benefits. On top of that, it has many years’ worth of operating deficits, as its top revenue generators no longer covered the costs of delivering the mail.

Then why do they need bailouts? Are these bailouts self funding? What money gave them that credit when they were long unsustainable? This is an unnatural monopoly that doesn’t allow competitors and also is a failure who mostly delivers worthless physical spam you cannot escape.

Because unlike any other company or agency, they are required to prepay retiree benefits.

Anyway, you might be surprised to hear that our Army and Navy aren't self-sustaining. Obviously, we should cut their funding and see how they manage to make their nukes pay for themselves. /s

If you don't get the difference between 401K and what the USPS was required to provide, you are deliberately obtuse, and are arguing in bad faith.

>The USPS already uses private carriers for remote places.

It's the other way around. I guess that settles the "if" in the above.

Also we kinda want to keep territories like Alaska inhabited because geopolitics.

And we kinda want the people living in those places to be able to get their official government documents (driver licenses, court notices, etc).

Then there's this idea of voting by mail, which isn't something that should be a privilege, but that's too complex for our discussion.

To translate one of the reasons for USPS into words you may understand: you know how two-factor authentication requires that second factor? The USPS provides a means for the gov to get that second factor into the hands of the people.

A third party would be a man-in-the-middle.

So consiser USPS a part of the government's 2FA infrastructure and messaging system with SLA and proof of delivery.

That, unlike your company's authentication infrastructure, happens to pay for itself.

Natural monopolies are things like electric power grid and water supply and train and roads, they last forever precisely because they are natural and they were never leapfrogged in history. 'Natural" part stands for nessesary inveatment in infrastructure being redundant and causing zero-sum game.

Kodak wasn't much of a monopoly and certainly wasn't a natural one

Read up on how antitrust actually works, your assesment of USPS is equally inaccurate