In 2018, right-wing commentator Dave Rubin went on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Rubin, at that point, was calling himself a libertarian. Rogan asked him about it, and he started going on about how the government doesn’t do anything right.

When Rubin started listing off examples, Rogan objected:

Rubin: Do they do the Post Office well? No! Like, what do they do well?

Rogan: They do the Post Office pretty good, actually.

Rubin: But guess what, if the Post Office closed tomorrow, you’ll be alright, you’d still get mail. Amazon would…

Rogan: It would suck.

As the conversation went on, Rogan raised the everyman concern that “it would cost a lot more” and Rubin hand-waved this away, insisting that “competition would kick in.” Between “UPS and Amazon and FedEx and drones,” the invisible hand of the free market would surely take care of any problems.

Rogan’s incredulity about this claim was probably shared by most of his audience. At the time, Rubin’s fantasy about how even the Post Office could be privatized without this leading to any problems was just an amusing illustration of how a fringe ideology like libertarianism can make people argue for bizarre things.

Yet yesterday, president-elect Donald Trump confirmed that he’s eyeballing a plan to privatize the United States Postal Service (USPS). He said he’s “considering it,” and that it’s “not the worst idea” he’s heard.

If that’s true, he must be hearing some truly awful ideas.

The USPS Offers an Irreplaceable Public Service

The very design of the postal service is tied to its public mission. Indeed, common sense should tell anyone that no private company would ever have an incentive to carry a letter from Los Angeles to rural Alaska for seventy-three cents (the current cost of a USPS stamp).

And there are large swathes of the country where, if the public post offices were closed or sold to corporations whose first duty was to shareholder revenues, it simply wouldn’t be profitable to offer mail service at all. The USPS has a “universal service” mandate that requires it to operate everywhere in the country. No private alternative ever would.

The USPS lost $2.1 billion on $21.6 billion gross revenue in the first quarter of this year. But a core point of the institution is that profitability is not its primary imperative. A public postal service, that has far greater freedom to operate at a loss since it doesn’t have shareholders of its own, plays a vital role in propping up the business models of any number of for-profit businesses.

Any enterprise that sells things through the mail, receives checks through the mail, or even just orders supplies through the mail, benefits from the USPS in the same way all firms benefit from being able to operate on public roads and use power, water, and gas utilities. Privatization could thus not only deprive the public at large of vital services directly offered through the Post Office, but cause ripple effects of unpredictable chaos throughout the economy.

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