Comments:

1) "Ever wonder why the founding fathers put it right in the Constitution?...If you privatize the system costs WILL rise."

2) "in the meantime the other company you're competing with is just doubling up on all your delivery resources so they can deliver to the same places you are where before a single delivery organization was handling everything. Which is wasting MASSIVE amounts of money."

Responses:

1) The Articles of Confederation (which fed the concepts for the Constitution) stated "The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of … establishing or regulating post offices from one State to another, throughout all the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing through the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of the said office…". The Constitution says "Congress shall have the power...to establish post offices and post roads." Jefferson argued that the responsibility of establishing roads should be a State's responsibility and foresaw that a federal system would become a waste of money. Another thing to think about is the fact that the original postal system was from post office to post office, not house to house like it is now. It wasn't until 1863 that the post was delivered to homes as part of "Free City Delivery". Then, it wasn't until 1890 that "Rural Free Delivery" became an option.

2) I'd have to disagree with your premise. Even now, location and size determine the shipping cost of your UPS or FedEx packages. I don't think that would change. Some people would continue to pay lower costs for locations close to sorting centers. Some would pay more for locations furthest from sorting centers. Privatized companies operate on margins. Each industry has an acceptable margin of operation. If a company operates outside of those margins they tend to fail. Either they lose money because they are operating at too small of margins, or they lose money because they operate to far above the margin and competitors are operating within the margins. I would be more inclined to believe that if UPS and FedEx competed on standard mail, we would pay less for letters to certain recipients and more for others compared to current prices. I would also be more inclined to believe that either rural recipients would be required to travel to retrieve mail or the private companies would divide the destinations.

Bottom line, USPS is not only wasting postage fees, but also taxpayer's money. What is worse, requiring that a few voluntarily pay more for postage or mandate that everyone pay a little (via taxes)? USPS costs the average resident $235 per year to operate. I definitely don't get that much service out of it, so I am helping to pay for the rural recipients, which sounds too much like Socialism for my liking.