I like the way things are done around here….

“But as I said above, at 7 billion a year in lost revenue, you could probably pay FedEx to cover that small segment left out by USPS and still have money left over. Hence there would be GREATER coverage at less loss.”

It reminds me of this old WSJ article on Amtrak,

We’re not against trains; they can be a great way to see America. But Amtrak has poorly served customers and taxpayers alike and is arguably the nation’s worst-run commercial enterprise. It loses $1 billion a year ($45 per rider) and that doesn’t include some $10 billion in deferred maintenance costs. Every route run by Amtrak loses money, and some are horrendously unprofitable. The long-distance route from Los Angeles to Florida loses $400 for every passenger who comes aboard. It would cost taxpayers less if Congress purchased free discount airline tickets for every traveler….

Emphasis mine.

Because if the postal service only delivered mail to 70% or 80% of the people in the country, the word I would use for that would be “inefficient”.

Consider this from the New York Times:

His last quarter’s results, which were announced on Wednesday, revealed a loss of $2.4 billion. The business is on track to lose a staggering $7 billion in 2009, on around $68 billion in revenue. That’s practically General Motors territory….

…A few weeks ago, the Government Accountability Office added the Postal Service to its list of “high risk” federal agencies, meaning that it is in such dire straits that it needs “to restructure to address its current and long-term financial viability.” Indeed, if something doesn’t change by the fall, the Postal Service will have to renege on those health benefit prepayments — despite its legal obligation to pay them — or start missing payroll.

At these prices, FedEx could probably pay someone to personally hand deliver all the mail to these remote suburbs and still make a profit.

But this does show a basic fundamental difference between the right and the left: the left tends to favor equality at almost all costs, the right tends to favor efficiency.

The way I see it, the USPS is an excellent example of why you DO want government running certain things. If this were left to private enterprise, millions of Americans in rural areas would be without postal service today, since it would not be “cost-effective”.

The same is true for all sorts of stuff.