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PRIVATIZING THE POST OFFICE WOULD BE A DISASTER  
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Ben Burgis
December 17, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Yesterday Donald Trump confirmed that he’s considering
privatizing the US Postal Service. That would be a big step in the
direction of a libertarian dystopia. _

, Irfan Khan

 

In 2018, right-wing commentator Dave Rubin went on _The Joe Rogan
Experience _podcast. Rubin, at that point, was calling himself a
libertarian. Rogan asked him
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started going on about how the government doesn’t do anything right.

When Rubin started listing off examples, Rogan objected:

Rubin: Do they do the Post Office well? No! Like, what do they do
well?

Rogan: They do the Post Office pretty good, actually.

Rubin: But guess what, if the Post Office closed tomorrow, you’ll be
alright, you’d still get mail. Amazon would. . .

Rogan: It would suck.

As the conversation went on, Rogan raised the everyman concern that
“it would cost a lot more” and Rubin hand-waved this away,
insisting that “competition would kick in.” Between “UPS and
Amazon and FedEx and drones,” the invisible hand of the free market
would surely take care of any problems.

Rogan’s incredulity about this claim was probably shared by most of
his audience. At the time, Rubin’s fantasy about how _even the Post
Office_ could be privatized without this leading to any problems was
just an amusing illustration of how a fringe ideology like
libertarianism can make people argue for bizarre things.

Yet yesterday, president-elect Donald Trump confirmed
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he’s eyeballing a plan to privatize the United States Postal Service
(USPS). He said he’s “considering it,” and that it’s “not
the worst idea” he’s heard.

If that’s true, he must be hearing some truly awful ideas.

The USPS Offers an Irreplaceable Public Service

The very design of the postal service is tied to its public mission.
Indeed, common sense should tell anyone that no private company would
ever have an incentive to carry a letter from Los Angeles to rural
Alaska for seventy-three cents (the current cost of a USPS stamp).

And there are large swathes of the country where, if the public post
offices were closed or sold to corporations whose first duty was to
shareholder revenues, it simply wouldn’t be profitable to offer mail
service at all. The USPS has a “universal service” mandate that
requires it to operate everywhere in the country. No private
alternative ever would.

The USPS lost $2.1 billion on $21.6 billion gross revenue in the first
quarter of this year. But a core point of the institution is that
profitability is _not_ its primary imperative. A public postal
service, that has far greater freedom to operate at a loss since it
doesn’t have shareholders of its own, plays a vital role in propping
up the business models of any number of for-profit businesses.

Any enterprise that sells things through the mail, receives checks
through the mail, or even just orders supplies through the mail,
benefits from the USPS in the same way all firms benefit from being
able to operate on public roads and use power, water, and gas
utilities. Privatization could thus not only deprive the public at
large of vital services directly offered through the Post Office, but
cause ripple effects of unpredictable chaos throughout the economy.

Honest Work

The postal service has also been an important source of unionized
jobs, available to all comers according to fair civil-service rules.
Historically, this made it an important source of upward mobility for
many black families locked out of other careers by racial
discrimination. By the end of the twentieth century, black Americans
made up 21 percent
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the postal workforce, around double their representation in the
general civilian labor force.

That’s just one striking example of the benefits of public sector
employment in communities across America. As of last year
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the USPS had around 640,000 employees, responsible for
delivering _billions_ of letters and packages around the country.
This makes it one of America’s largest civilian workforces, and
unlike some even larger ones like Walmart, these are workers with
decent wages, benefits, job protection, and at least some say in
bargaining over working conditions.

These hard-won gains secured over the decades by postal workers’
unions have been chipped away at in all sorts of ways, but the
enduring achievements of these struggles are very real. If the “not
the worst idea” that Trump floated — and which some of his
associates, like billionaire Elon Musk, are openly rooting for —
came to pass, working for a future privatized mail carrier would
likely be much less like this and much more like working for
McDonald’s or Walmart.

As the American Postal Workers Union notes
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would perpetrate a double harm, both hurting “postal families”
that directly rely on these jobs and ending a basic right currently
“guaranteed for all Americans.”

And the hypocrisy inherent in the idea is off the charts. Trump, the
alleged “populist,” often claims to care about lost American jobs,
and to speak for Americans who live in the heartland, neglected by
coastal elites. Why, then, is he considering sacrificing hundreds of
thousands of good jobs ordinary people across the country are relying
on to provide for their families? And why would he want to put basic
mail delivery in low-volume rural areas in jeopardy by tossing the
keys to corporations for whom this would be unprofitable?

We Need a Bigger Public Postal Service

You don’t have to be a socialist to understand that mail is a vital
public service that needs to be provided within the public sector.
Even the founding fathers, hardly radical egalitarians, wrote
Congress’s power to “establish Post Offices and post roads” into
Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution. And polls consistently
show
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it’s the single highest-rated government agency among the general
public.

In the face of Trump’s push against the USPS, we shouldn’t just
defend the status quo but advocate expansion of the Post Office. One
of the biggest and most obvious ways in which this could happen would
be letting every Post Office offer basic banking services. Many
countries around the world already do this
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and introducing it to the United States could provide tremendous
benefit to the millions of adults without bank accounts and currently
vulnerable to the predations of payday loan companies.

Similarly, the USPS could get into the business of providing broadband
in underserved rural areas. Nearly one in four
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of such areas currently say that lack of reliable internet access is a
major issue in their community, and the postal service could be
uniquely well-positioned to step in, given that it already operates in
every rural area.

Finally, current regulations, often written with an eye to protecting
the profits private-sector delivery services, unreasonably restrict
what the USPS can offer customers even in terms of basic mail
services. As Bernie Sanders has noted
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“Currently, it is against the law for workers in the post offices to
make copies of documents, deliver wine or beer, and wrap Christmas
presents.” That’s absurd. Lifting all of these restrictions would
both bolster a service that provides good jobs across the country and
can provide even more as it expands, and directly and tangibly benefit
any ordinary American who goes to the post office.

That Trump says he’s considering doing the opposite and fulfilling
the deranged fantasy of Dave Rubin offers yet another grim preview of
his forthcoming administration.

_Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor
at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and
podcast Give Them An Argument. _

* US Post Office
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* privatization
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* Donald Trump
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* Unmitigated Disasters
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