Other Countries Have Privatized Post Offices. Why Can't the US?

If we want to leave our children and grandchildren a better world, instead of one buried under bureaucracy and debt, it's time to get serious about reforming government.

One of the remarkable things about the internet is how little one typically learns from it.

When the technology was first introduced, many assumed it would make humankind wiser, but some saw the future better. In his magnum opus From Dawn to Decadence, the historian Jacques Barzun talked about the downsides of the internet, a technology still at its dawn.

“[The internet] made still more general the nerveless mode of existence – sitting and staring – and thus further isolated the individual,” he wrote. “It enlarged the realm of abstraction; to command the virtual reduces the taste for the concrete. At the same time, the contents of the Internet were the same old items in multiplied confusion.”

I think it’s fair to say the Internet has added an element of confusion to our age, and few of us would deny Barzun’s point about “sitting and staring.”

The amount of distraction on the internet is virtually infinite. Whether your poison is cat videos, celebrity gossip, clickbait political news, Instagram models, BuzzFeed quizzes, Reddit rabbit holes on Star Wars, online shopping, poker hands (guilty), or something else, you can waste countless amounts of precious time learning and doing nothing.

Still, every once in a while one does learn something important on the internet. A recent example for me was reading Pete Earle on the potential privatization of the US Post Office.

Now, I’ve long been a proponent of privatizing the Post Office. There’s simply no persuasive argument that we (taxpayers) should be funding a department that would actually generate revenues and make a profit if we simply allowed it to operate as a private enterprise.

Chris Edwards has a good article at the Cato Institute explaining the inefficiencies and sclerosis of the Post Office, which lost nearly $10 billion last year.

“The company had 31,123 locations in 2023—about the same number as in 2014,” writes Edwards. “Yet over those nine years, the number of USPS retail customer visits plunged 30 percent. The USPS should be closing locations, but members of Congress resist closings in their districts.”

This is the difference between a public system and a private one. When a location is consistently losing money in the private sector, changes typically are made so it doesn’t sink the company.

That’s what Walgreens recently did.

In October 2024, the pharmacy store chain announced plans to close approximately 1,200 underperforming locations nationwide over the next few years to counter declining profits caused by low drug reimbursement rates and weak retail sales.

The closures were no doubt painful for those who lost jobs, but the move will (hopefully) allow Walgreens to survive, better serve its customers, and return the store to profitability. (The company’s price-earnings ratio is currently negative, and the stock is down nearly 80% over the last 5 years.)

The Post Office shows that the government works in exactly the opposite fashion. Last year’s multibillion-dollar loss wasn’t exactly an outlier. In 2023 the loss was $6.5 billion. In fact, if you pull up recent numbers, you’ll find almost nothing but massive losses.

• 2020 - $9.2 billion loss

• 2019 - $8.8 billion loss

• 2018 - $3.9 billion loss

• 2017 - $2.7 billion loss

• 2016 - $5.6 billion loss

• 2015 - $5.1 billion loss

• 2014 - $5.5 billion loss

• 2013 - $5 billion loss

• 2012 - $15.9 billion loss

• 2011 - $5.1 billion loss

• 2010 - $8.5 billion loss

• 2009 - $3.8 billion loss

• 2008 - $2.8 billion loss

• 2007 - $5.1 billion loss

This is a fine formula if you believe resources grow on trees and you don’t care about product innovation. (The only “innovation” I see from the Post Office is hikes in the price of stamps, which never seem to change their bottom line.)

This brings me back to Earle.

What I didn’t know until I read his article—“Is it Finally Time to Privatize the United States Postal Service?”—is that many other countries that once had public post offices woke up long ago. They realized that racking up red ink year after year didn’t make a lot of sense, so they launched private ownership initiatives that improved performance, created competition, fostered innovation, and created savings.

Pete offers several examples.

“Germany’s Deutsche Post, privatized in 2000, transformed into a global logistics leader under the DHL brand, while the UK’s Royal Mail, privatized in 2013, modernized its operations and enhanced service delivery,” he writes. “And since 2007, Japan has been privatizing its postal service in stages, beginning with the transformation of Japan Post into a state-owned corporation and its subsequent reorganization into separate entities for mail delivery, banking, and insurance services.”

While critics fear that privatizing the USPS could lead to inadequate service for rural communities or higher costs for consumers, Earle also points to another international success story. Sweden’s CityMail, a private enterprise that delivers to some 6 million individuals and businesses in Sweden, has sustained affordable rural delivery by implementing innovations such as cluster mailboxes.

The fact that I didn’t know any of this and was at best vaguely aware of it is a bit embarrassing to admit. I work as an editor of a free market think tank, after all. I’m supposed to know these things.

This brings me back to my earlier point about the internet. We have wonderful blueprints for reforming a dysfunctional federal department that is costing billions of dollars every year, but almost nobody even knows it. It’s like important government reforms can’t compete with all the other distractions. The Selena Gomez meltdown. The Lily Phillips-Bonnie Blue feud.

(READ Pete Earle’s entire article here)

My point is this: if we want to leave our children and grandchildren a better world, instead of one buried under bureaucracy and debt, we need to keep our eye on the ball.

The time for reform is now.