Why is the government expected to be profitable? Is the military profitable? What about the national park service? I don't want government to be profitable--I want them to provide the service they are asked to provide in a way that his highly available and accessible.

It is ideological. Many point to private courier services as an 'obvious' point of comparison.

However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.

> It is ideological. Many point to private courier services as an 'obvious' point of comparison.

On a couple different levels:

1. Some people (like libertarians) have an ideological opposition to government-provided services, and believe all or nearly all services provided by the government should be abolished and replaced with the "free market."

2. An ideological belief that private business is "efficient" and government is "bloated and wasteful."

3. An lazy belief that "the government should be run like a business," therefore the tools you use to evaluate a business (like profitability), should be used to evaluate government.

There are good libertarian arguments for a government run post office -- particularly in how it support free speech, the right to petition, free and fair elections, how it uniquely protects 4th amendment rights, etc.

Key difference though is that the people/lobbies using libertarianism as a platform for support don’t actually care about free speech, etc etc. They care about money.

> 1. Some people (like libertarians) have an ideological opposition to government-provided services, and believe all or nearly all services provided by the government should be abolished and replaced with the "free market."

This is achieveable with “If you want to be licensed to deliver postal services, you have to deliver everywhere without discrimnating on price”. And the free market will find ways to make that work.

Yes, very ideological. Some people want government to run like a business. Is your state/county/city not profitable enough? Then your state gets fired or downsized. Or maybe sold to the highest bidder.

In any event, the US Constitution requires a post office.

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8

> The Congress shall have Power ...

> To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

Not that I think they should, but Congress could legally vote to abolish the postal service. They had the power to create it but they weren't required to.

I think my state has already been sold to the highest bidder.

A profit is the net value given to society minus the cost taken from society. Example: you take floor worth 1 from society, make a cake and sell it for 3. You gave 3 and took 1, enriching society by 2.

It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.

This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but id the poorest people who gets the worst if it.

I like this analogy. The government should of course aim to make as much money as possible

I'm sorry, what? You didn't give society 3, you gave it 1+the value of your added work, and pocketed the difference between that amount and 3. And before anyone jumps in to claim that people paying 3 means the item is actually objectively worth 3 - no, government services are often essential and irreplaceable, people are often willing to pay anything for them. This is like saying I somehow added 10000 of value to society by refusing to extinguish someone's burning house for anything less than that amount, despite it costing me far less. As for any non-essential services, that difference is covered by advertising and all sorts of manipulative tricks humanity has come up to force people to make irrational choices, especially over the last century.

Profit-seeking is the epitome of selfishness that can only be justified through twisted ideologies. When applied to governments that are supposed to take the least and give the most, it is pure evil, just skimming off goods and services someone desperately needs to put that in your pocket.

You pay 3 only if you value what you buy more than what you pay, so you win by buying. Otherwise you would not buy. The seller had no power on how much you value it, so you decide how much is the cake valued. That's independent of the cost of manufacturing.

Because the value of things is decided by consumers, the value is independent of the cost of production, and for that reason is a lie that the difference between value and cost is the labor.

If labor were worth the difference between product value and cost, it would not be justified to produce anything, because at the end of day, nothing would be won by working. It only makes sense to work if the final product is more valuable than what was spent, including labor.

Your argument is that "essential services" have infinite value, and that's false.

Because value is relative to other valued things.

Resources are limited, so what you spend on "essential services" cannot be spent on other things.

Healthcare is "essential", but if you spend 100% of resources in healthcare, it will never be enough. You can spend billions to keep alive a person more minutes, and he will die anyways, but society would lose all housing, all food, all clothing, and would be miserable, so healthcare doesn't had infinite value.

If you find any "essential services" too expensive, is because you need other things more important, like having food or a house.

If the state pays for "free" healthcare, it has no limit to spending, and you cannot more get a house, food, clothing, or anything else.

That's why "essential services" have a price, like anything else, and should be restricted to be profitable.

Profit means that the value produced is higher than the cost, because the cost are other things that you need more.

That's a twisted and myopic logic. You've gone from net value and cost to society, which have broad definitions, and then in the next sentences equated both strictly to money.

Free market prices are a valuation of costs to society. It's the valuation that produces the best results. Humanity doesn't knows a better one.

There is value outside of money, mainly in our rights. A public post service protects your rights, like free speech and freedom from search.

It is highly unlikely that any private service will respect your free speech; naturally some post which is unpalatable to corporate PR will be censored. Moreover, your post will almost certainly be searched and data mined for additional profits.

The government is required to protect certain rights you have, the private sector is not. There is value in that which we cannot ascribe a monetary value to.

Marxist are the worst enemies of freedom of speech, and the government is socialism.

individuals need protection from the government more than anything else, and the government is the one always eroding all your freedoms

Umm of course the government should be profitable. How do you expect it to work if it doesn't make money? Government makes money from oil, trade, taxes, fines, etc. I don't think the government being profitable has been an issue at any point.

If the government is profitable, where did the national debt come from?

The Post Office was established before telegraph. Before the phone and Internet. Before 37 of the states were part of the Union. Perhaps we don't need to subsidize it to the degree we do anymore?

(subsidize: not only do we incurring retirement obligations from the general fund, we charge the same amount to deliver a letter to rural Alaska as we do to a place across the street)

We could cut costs by reducing mail delivery frequency country-wide and more in costlier areas. In the age of satellite Internet, the need for delivering a physical thing quickly is not something we need to federally subsidize (argument for slowly: yes). In my suburban area I'd be completely unaffected by 2/week delivery. People in rural areas need to pay the cost of living rural now that we don't have anyone subsistence farming.

What's the alternative? Be consistently underfunded and cut postal worker wages year after year? Somehow arrange to sell exactly the correct number of Forever stamps on Dec 31 to cover all expenses incurred over the year?

In my experience that API is also wildly inaccurate and is responsible for many misdelivered/undelivered packages because it will return random (well, previously used by someone else), different building/suite/apartment numbers for the same address line that already contains the correct one.

> I suspect the goal is to sell off a "money losing" USPS to some campaign contributor for $1 so that person can reap the $60B in pension funds.

it's not that complicated: FedEx and UPS and several other related business types have been trying to kill it for years

the "privatize everything" crowd that would charge you for air if they could.

USPS is being slowly killed at the behest of the real estate lobby who are licking their lips at the Post Office's multi-billion dollar real estate portfolio. There's no reason USPS needs to be profitable as a government service as a sibling comment has already pointed out.

Easy for private capital to make money of something everyone depends on that actually keep it free even if it “loses” money.