10 Reasons to Abolish the US Postal Service
10. USPS Has an Existential Crisis
To understand this crisis of obsolescence, all you really need to do is ask yourself when was the last time you got an actual letter, addressed to you in the mail with a stamp on it. Even Christmas cards and wedding invitations are going electronic. At most, 5 percent of all mail sent is personal correspondence. Magazines and newspapers are a mere 3.5 percent of what USPS delivers. More than half of all sent mail is advertising or junk mail.
The Postal Service no longer “binds the nation together through … correspondence” as the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 declared. Those days are long gone. From a 21st century perspective, the USPS looks like a hopelessly retrograde and environmentally damaging enterprise. We cut down trees, mill them into paper, print words on the paper, then transport the paper all over America in pollution-belching trucks, so that people may deliver them to 150 million addresses. Only to have people throw most of it away unopened.
The Postal Service cannot be abolished right away, because too many operations remain tied to it. But eventually a day of reckoning must come. A government operation that goes bankrupt should not be bailed out by a public who sees it as a pointless, environmentally harmful anachronism, not suited for the digital age we live in today.
