A question for the Post Office

The stamp is a tax, so your taxes do pay for mail. It seems fair to me that people who send more mail should have to pay more for it.

Back, about 160 years ago, I believe it was Lysander Spooner, somebody went into competition with the post office but instead of turning it over to him the government ignored the fact that he was doing a better job and made it illegal to operate a postal system as a private business. My favorite postal system is the Indian . The workers are very polite and instead of having to wait in line they offer a seat beside a table and bring you your mail. Maybe the fact that I was very fluent in English made me a member of the upper class.

I'm not 100% certain but I thought the post office was totally self sufficient. So they get zero money from the federal government. the only money the make is off sales. I dont know about the rest of you but i think its a pretty good deal to send a letter from Los Angeles to New York for .43 cents. You can always choose private mail carriers like UPS or FEDEX but that letter will be around 10 dollars or more.

Some countries have privatised their mail services and many companies compete with each other to be the ones you choose to deliver your mail. The problem is that they need to have a nationalised mail service for remote area which the privatised services won't deliver to because it's uneconomic. If it was privatised rural areas would lose out.

Your post office uses the profits from the economically viable services to support the uneconomical ones.

In the early days of the British post office, your stamp only ensured that your letter got to aa house within a certain number of miles from a local post office. If you lived further from that post office than the regulation you had to pay a surcharge or you didn't get your letter. Poor people in isolated communities often refused to pay and so missed out on whatever the letter contained.

Privatisation would lead to a similar situation happening now.