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 about it, and he 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 that 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 of 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, 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, privatization schemes 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 that 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, 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 residents 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, “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.
