Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

matt2000

It seems to me that the postal system has become little more than a subsidized marketing channel that is difficult to unsubscribe from, and a lazy communication choice for the most inefficient companies. It should at the very least be priced based on the costs of operating it. In it's current subsidized form it produces incentives to keep using it and makes electronic alternatives seem more expensive.

For environmental, business efficiency, and personal reasons it seems like we would be better off receiving far less physical mail.

View on HN

Maybe you should reread the article. It plainly says that the USPS is not subsidized.

... although it should be IMHO. Also I agree with the case made for a public internet.

Why should the USPS be subsidized?

A country should IMHO guarantee its residents access to mail. And nowadays, internet and phone lines.

Why not subsidize any form of mail, including those through private companies?

But wouldn't it be more equitable (people will send different amounts of mail) and more utilitarian to just directly transfer the cost of the subsidy to everybody below an income or wealth threshold?

Instead of the government saying "you can only spend this on mail", let people decide whether they want to get access to mail, or buy other things.

The problem here is that you're taking for granted that people would want to spend that money on mail rather than other things.

>But wouldn't it be more equitable (people will send different amounts of mail) and more utilitarian to just directly transfer the cost of the subsidy to everybody below an income or wealth threshold?

No.

Why?

The theory is that (as, at one time, with rural electrification and universal telephone service), there is societal value to having more or less universal mail delivery. That said, as the importance of physical mail as a communications mechanism declines, it becomes harder to argue that the USPS shouldn't need to cover its costs.

What is the societal value? Only the two people who send and receive benefit.

Not true. Society as whole benefits from greater communication and spread of ideas. We aren't just talking letters to Grandma but magazines and journals. Yes, you can argue that paper mail is now only one of several methods of long-distance communication (and one which isn't preferred by many), but is still the one with the least capability of censorship (yes, it can be done, as Communist and Fascist dictorships did, but it requires massive manual effort).

If I discuss ideas between me and another person society does not benefit; only the two benefit.

If I subscribe to a magazine and journal, only I benefit.

So, why should the people who don't use mail pay for the people who do use mail?

> but is still the one with the least capability of censorship (yes, it can be done, as Communist and Fascist dictorships did, but it requires massive manual effort).

Why do you think it has the least capability of censorship, especially versus the internet?

The development of science and technology was only possible with scientists and engineers communicating their results via mailed journals, for starters. Everybody benefited from that, not just the scientists and engineers themselves. As for censorship, Internet censorship (as in the "Great Firewall of China") is rather easy to automate (and is getting harder to avoid). Paper censorship (such as in East Germany) required thousands of workers to open and read mail physically in order to check if anything subversive was being discussed. Maybe with modern OCR it could be automated a bit more, but still not as easy as just blocking a website.

> The development of science and technology was only possible with scientists and engineers communicating their results via mailed journals, for starters. Everybody benefited from that, not just the scientists and engineers themselves.

Then you can improve patent protection or other mechanisms for compensating scientists. Subsidizing mail for everybody is inefficient.

I'm pretty sure the article is incorrect on that topic, in that the postal service receives indirect subsidies that some estimate to be worth $18B a year: http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/

I'm sure you could argue with the dollar amount estimate, but not that it isn't a form of subsidy.

However, one thing everyone agrees on is that most of the mail I receive sucks. :)

The dollar amount is preposterous and I don't see how those are subsidies that encourage physical marketing.

18 billion is the correct amount

https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1C...

That's not proof, that's a number of different stories using the same crappy report.

Regarding USPS "subsidization": I've seen it written that a big part of why USPS budgeting shows huge losses is its benefits expenditures for retired/disabled employees, and this is accounted/reported in a different way from other Federal employees (i.e. more like the private sector). Does this ring a bell for anybody else?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com