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When the U.S. postal service was founded, people only had a few ways to communicate with each other.  One was face to face communication; another was to send and receive a letter; a third was news sheets and eventually newspapers.  The situation is much different today.  People have numerous communication channels, e.g. email, telephones, personal communication devices, TV, etc.  This is one of the reasons the first class mail carried by the postal service is dwindling as a cascading rate. Federal Express, UPS, etc. deliver to thousands of large, medium, and small communities in the U.S., indeed around the world.  They service Alpine, Texas, for example.  There is no reason why they could not deliver first class mail to Alpine, except for the Congressional restriction that grants an exclusive first class mail franchise to the U.S. postal service.  If someone chooses to live on a hilltop 50 miles south of Alpine, as indeed some people do, is it unreasonable to ask them to pick up their mail, if they have any, when they are in Alpine or pay a premium to have it delivered?  I have a friend in just that situation; he uses email for most of his communication. Put some competition into the postal service, as has happened with the overnight package business, and I suspect that we would see a greatly improved service. Fed EX and UPS are not subsidized, other than to say that some people claim they don't pay their fair share of the cost of the highways and airways that they use.  There is little empirical evidence to support this argument. The $40 billion spend on highways by the federal government is largely recovered through user fees, although they fell short of the requirements in 2007 and 2008 because the Congress has consistently refused to raise the fuel tax.  The same applies to the roughly $14 billion spent on the nation's airways.  Moreover, in the case of the federal transfers from the general funds to the dedicated funds, most of the nation's highway and airways users pay federal income taxes, which flow into the general fund and than are transferred to the dedicated highway and airway funds.   Passenger rail requires a large per passenger and per passenger mile subsidy from nonusers.  On average it was 19 times greater than the federal subsidy for highway and airways users in 2008.  On of the reasons it is so large is because there is no competition in the passenger rail business.  Another is an insistence, fostered in part by the advocacy community and their political allies, to run long distance passenger trains, which are the real reason Amtrak loses so much money. If the postal service and passenger rail were structured as competitive organizations, I suspect we would see significant improvements in both of them.  Unfortunately, most people still see the need for both through the eyes of their eighteenth and nineteenth century architects.  We are slow to recognize the changes around us, which are one of the reasons we hold onto a lot of outdate ideas and practices.
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