The United States Postal Service is close to irrelevant in my life. It is probably irrelevant in yours, too.
I have a PO Box. Not many people use them. They are convenient for avoiding any reference to my home address. I put my PO Box number on bank checks. I have letters sent to me at the PO Box.
I rarely go out to the front of my house to open up the mailbox. My wife does that. Mostly, it is filled with opportunity mail. (Skeptics refer to this as junk mail. I got my start in business mail over 40 years ago, so I prefer not to use the phrase "junk mail.")
I could set up a PO Box at a local private mail service company. If I ever went to the Post Office, that's what I would do. The local company is closer. But my wife is in charge of mail collection, and the post office is next door to our bank. It is convenient for her to use the PO Box.
The British used the American mail service as a way to spy on Americans before the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin was a postmaster. He used his contacts to promote a conspiracy against the British government, which I would say was one of the major backfires in the history of British-American relations.
The United States government set up the Post Office as a monopoly in 1789. It had very much the same function as Britain's: it was always used to spy on American communications. This tradition goes back to medieval China. The post office always let governments know where people lived. Governments always want to know this.
It was impossible politically to overturn the Post Office monopoly. That was a goal of some truly ideological conservatives back in the 1960's and 1970's. It proved fruitless as a political endeavor. Yet today, the Post Office is irrelevant. Hardly anybody goes to it to get mail. Hardly any mail that it delivers is both first-class and personal. We have made a technological end run around the Post Office, which is the oldest government monopoly in Western civilization.
We use email to communicate. For important items, we use FedEx and UPS. The Post Office is peripheral in our lives. Digital technology and the free market have replaced it.
It still is an expensive item of government. It will eventually default on all of its pensions. It is a mastodon caught in the tar pits of new technologies. It will take the bankruptcy of the federal government to eliminate it. But at least we are not dependent on it any longer.
The massive constituencies supporting Medicare and Social Security are going to bankrupt the federal government. The unfunded liabilities of the two programs now are in the range of $200 trillion. There is no way that these liabilities will ever be paid. There will be a great default of the U.S. government. Agencies that do not have active political constituencies are going to be sacrificed in the budget cutting. The United States Postal Service is clearly one of these agencies. There will be literally thousands of others. We don't know their names, which is why they will be sacrificed.
It has proven impossible to get rid of government agencies. This does not mean that these agencies provide services that are relevant to the vast majority of Americans. They provide services to aging constituencies. They are expenses that show up in the federal budget, but we are not dependent on them. This is the key factor. We can live our lives apart from them, as long as we keep paying taxes, and as long as the government can still borrow money. When that situation ends, which it will during the great default, we can abandon these bureaucracies, and their constituents will be too feeble politically to resist.
Technologies in the private sector are enabling us to sever our dependence on government. Millions of bureaucrats regulate us, but they provide almost no services that we are dependent on. This means that, during the great default, we will be able politically to eliminate these agencies, and nobody will feel much pain. Their constituencies are growing older. Eventually, these voters are going to die off. The agencies that cater to them are relics of the pre-Internet era.
I think the USPS is a ripple of the future. It used to be a wave.
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