The harms of running the USPS like a business

Running government services like a company is a bad idea. The word itself, when applied to governance, makes no sense.

Profit comes from running things like a company. But where do they want the money to go? Profits in a typical firm go to the proprietors. A company is a type of entity that is especially organized to transfer money from customers to private owners or shareholders. 

Photo by Trinity Nguyen on Unsplash

If it is not transferring wealth to owners, it is cannibalizing profits in order to produce an even better money vacuum that will suck up even more money for the advantage of the owners. That's it. A firm does not manufacture computers or operate online stores. A business is anything that delivers wealth to its stockholders in every way it can.

So, if you want to operate government like a company, you want the profits to go back to the shareholders, which in the case of government are.... people.

Which sounds suspiciously like the socialism that these people despise for no apparent reason.

Because a package company, such as FedEx, does not exist TO BE A PACKAGE COMPANY, you cannot manage government "like a business." Its purpose is to transfer money. That is, if it is no longer profitable to deliver things, they will pivot. 

Alternatively, mass layoffs might be implemented. I honestly don't see why Republicans don't grasp it and can't get it.There are several ways for a firm to transfer money to its owners.

A service exists solely to provide a service. It makes no difference if the USPS makes money delivering mail. We require postal delivery. This is the distinction. The essential distinction.

Imagine you're sitting in your house, drinking water, and a private firm that supplies your water decides one day that it's no longer profitable to provide it to you. So they instantly close up, don't notify you they're closing up, and flee.

Your home now has no running water. Your house has no worth because it lacks water. That's terribly awful for you. Water should have been designated a public service.

We rely on the postal service. It makes things happen. Things fall apart without mail. If something is that important to the everyday operations of everything, we call it infrastructure, and we run it as a public service rather than for profit.

Profitably operating a business that manufactures boutique trendy laptops makes sense.

It makes no sense to run a hospital for profit. It makes no sense to run a road for profit. It makes no sense to run a pharmaceutical firm that produces pharmaceuticals based on taxpayer-funded research that it does not pay for.

Consider hospitals. The majority of hospitals in the United States are privately owned and operated for profit. What is extremely detrimental to a for-profit hospital? Hospital beds are all empty. That is why hospitals do not build additional hospital beds. 

It is far preferable for a hospital to have too few beds than too many. What else is detrimental to a for-profit hospital? Having more nurses than are strictly necessary to complete the basic minimum. That is why there are so many nurse shortages and so many healthcare professional burnouts.

It's absolutely ridiculous that America has almost twice as much wealth as the entire continent of Europe. We are easily wealthy enough to run every hospital as a service, provide people with free access to that service, pay doctors competitive salaries, and have a ton of extra hospital beds just in case, you know, we have some kind of once in a generation pandemic that threatens to completely overwhelm our medical system by creating a demand for more hospital beds than our system can handle.

There are times when you don't want a service or utility to be driven primarily by the profit of private persons.

Anyone still remember Theranos? The scandal-plagued former Sillcon Valley blood-testing equipment manufacturer? Elizabeth Holmes, the company's creator, developed a fixation about Steve Jobs and idolized him. 

When it came to his products, Steve Jobs was famed for not taking no for an answer and insisting that features be included even when many around him stated it was not feasible. On certain things, he would "fake it until he built it," promising features that no one thought were possible and then faking it until his engineers delivered.

Elizabeth Holmes sought to employ that similar tactics. However, they were no longer high-end devices for hipsters. They were devices that tested people for potentially fatal and infectious illnesses such as pancreatic cancer and hepatitis C.

So Theranos misled investors and customers as they urgently sought to make their machine a reality, and the outcome was that they had ill-equipped machines out in the field testing humans for illness and producing completely wrong and false findings, even as she lied about the progress.

Taking such risks makes financial sense when the sole negative is that customers will get a crappy laptop. When it comes to health care, though, you risk hundreds of thousands of lives. Or perhaps electricity. Or any of the other countless things on which we rely.

The United States has always had a diverse economy. It is not necessary to have ALL of one type of economy or another.

Our economy is divided into industries. You may make certain sectors public (healthcare, for example) that utilize tax resources to provide organized products for the benefit of all, while making others private (electronics, for example) that create consumer goods and value for shareholders.

This is acceptable. The US economy does not require a radical revamp. We just need to modify the public-private sector ratio to the extent that many other nations have done with tremendous success.

The effective socialism that exists in other nations is just a model in which taxpayers are basically stockholders. The people own the public services, not the government. And the people chose competent caretakers to handle them in the same manner that shareholders choose CEOs of public corporations through a board of directors.

Republicans' scare tactics about socialist revolutions are never this type of socialism. They are essentially kleptocracies or oligarchies that do not have free elections and falsely claim to be socialism while establishing dictators.

If individuals applied a little common sense, they would realize that opening up certain sectors to the public is a straightforward and highly beneficial change. They may still go off on their own and become billionaires. They will not be hampered by socialist plans.