It's "self-sufficient" in the sense that they do not get direct taxpayer dollars to pay for operation like other departments. It is not "self-sufficient" in the sense that it runs at a massive deficit and has to borrow money from the US Treasury like crazy to stay afloat. For the last 3 years, the post office has borrowed the maximum $3B from the Treasury, and is expected to lose $238B in the next 10 years.

There's a limit. The municipality can offer 100% "free" service to users by taxing people to pay for it. The private corporation is dependent on people paying for service - they cannot use force to take money from people in order to pay for it.

Does "funded entirely by its own revenue" include the near $15 billion that the post office has borrowed from the US Treasury?

GAO report: "In each of the last 3 fiscal years, the USPS borrowed the maximum $3B from the US Treasury and incurred record financial losses. In fiscal year 2010, the USPS plans to borrow another $3B from the US Treasury." "In fiscal year 2010, USPS expects a record loss of over $7B, and its outstanding debt to increase to $13.2B."

Sorry, but just because the Post Office is "independent" does not mean that it does not receive taxpayer assistance, or that the government is not going to assume those liabilities over time, especially if the Post Office continues to run at record losses. In fact, with respect to retirement benefit payments, the Post Office has unique requirements above other government agencies precisely because "[u]nlike other federal agencies, whose future ability to pay retirement benefits remains unquestioned, the USPS's ever-declining mail volume has made prepayment seem like a sensible precaution. If the Postal Service can't afford to pay for these retiree benefits now, what makes Congress think it will be able to pay in the future, when the number of postal ratepayers will have plummeted still further? If first-class mail volume continues its downward spiral, taxpayers will be next to foot the bill." [link]

I would question how Comcast got monopoly status over ISP service in the area. I thought the government was supposed to do something about monopolies, not pass laws that permanently entrench the monopolies as long as they don't do certain things to their consumers.

One thing that is sorely lacking from this discussion is NN's impact on the poor. What if I only care about those 200 sites? What if it reduced my bill to $10 a month because I'm only pulling from cached content on Comcast's servers? The NN position is that there should be no such plans, because all people must get access to all the internet. So now those that may want the internet but have trouble affording a $60 a month broadband plan have their choices artificially limited by government regulation - they can either find a way to pay the $60, or go without the internet at all.

I agree with the majority of posters in this thread - there is an absence of competition in this market, and so therefore regulation seems to be the optimum solution. But the argument also seems to be so selfish - that *I* want to be able to access all the sites, and *I* shouldn't have to bother finding another company that will provide it for me, so the easiest solution is to get the government to force companies to do what *I* want, and never mind the consequences to those that are less fortunate than me.

You really don't understand that the two are completely linked? That the shareholder's bottom line is determined by profits that are generated by customers that choose to turn money over for a product or a service?

Really? Your first response is the US monopoly Postal Service, which is currently expected to lose $238 billion over the next 10 years? The one that is asking to reduce service for the same price by eliminating Saturday delivery?

If you want to give me examples of what the government does right, I'm sure you can find one that doesn't hemorrhage taxpayer money for less service than I can get from a number of private companies.

Can you give a reason?

Personally, I find the disparity between cocaine and crack possession sentences an absolute travesty of justice and far more harming than the idea of separate but terribly unequal government facilities and services. They're both racist. One involves taking another man/woman's freedom from them, physically, while separate but equal is more psychological than physical.

Jim Crow segregation was institutionalized in Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy is a case where the State of Louisiana passed a racist law, and after the case was argued, the State upheld the racism - it's not a private property matter. As a result of the 7-1 decision, the racists had the power of the federal government at their hands, telling the people that separate but equal was not just an option, but a mandated federal policy.

This is where people argue against "libertarian policies" when the reality is that government institutionalizes racism. Plessy is not the only case; the "war on drugs" is an equally vile racist policy that the US uses to discriminate against minorities and impose uneven punishments towards certain races. It's hard to argue that the government protects the people from racism when there are documented cases of the government making that racism law and upholding it through the use of force.

My straw man is satire, just an echo of the OPs argument in reverse.

If I were to argue anything, I would argue that the current system failed because of corporatism or "crony capitalism". Because of government regulations, BP has a ceiling limit on what it is liable for in damages. They may pay more, but that's really an issue of public image rather than legal liability (some would argue this is what keeps BP in check in the absence of gov't regulations, but I'm not even arguing for less regulation). Government is aiding BP, in exchange for money to win future political campaigns. BP gets to try and make as much money as possible free from the regulations that hamper its competition, thanks to government.

Pro-capitalists blame the government. Anti-capitalists blame the corporations. This is a false dichotomy: both groups share blame, because the system is increasingly set up so that the two of those groups benefit. Meanwhile the third group, the people, have to suffer.

"We're talking about giant, ridiculously wealthy multinational corporations. The government is the only hope that people have of making any sort of stand against them."

This is where we get into opinion that neither of us can argue. I don't fear a corporation, because they only have as much power over me as I give them. I fear the government, because they have a monopoly on legal use of physical force. A corporation cannot come into my home, armed and without invite; the police can. A corporation cannot falsely imprison a person without consequence; the government can. BP is giant and ridiculously wealthy precisely because the government enables that behavior through back-office deals and anti-competitive laws. They create a system where I have little choice but to buy gasoline from BP, because regulation and favoritism has made it too costly for any new competition to do business against BP.

As I said, I'm not arguing that the existing rules on off-shore drilling should be eliminated. That's someone else's straw man opinion of the libertarian position. I'm arguing that, even with all the perfect regulations in place, BP can just pay some Senator and somehow get temporary exclusion from those regulations. Regardless of what other problems the "free-market" may come with (and libertarians rarely argue that those bad things don't happen, just that government tends to make them worse), at least "hands-off" capitalism means that the politicians can't give favors to these corporations and enable this kind of behavior further.

There is no "system". Push hard enough, and every libertarian will eventually find some position where they're uncomfortable enough with the idea of true "freedom" as to desire a legislated authoritarian solution. Push any authoritarian, and you'll find some position where they're uncomfortable enough with the idea of the use of government force as to desire a hands-off approach.

I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, it doesn't lie in calling every liberal a socialist. It doesn't come from straw man arguments that reducing the size of government means privatized roads and fire departments. The answer, like all things, is neither black nor white.

U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study

FTA: "The Interior Department exempted BP's calamitous Gulf of Mexico drilling operation from a detailed environmental impact analysis last year, according to government documents, after three reviews of the area concluded that a massive oil spill was unlikely. The decision by the department's Minerals Management Service (MMS) to give BP's lease at Deepwater Horizon a "categorical exclusion" from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on April 6, 2009 -- and BP's lobbying efforts just 11 days before the explosion to expand those exemptions -- show that neither federal regulators nor the company anticipated an accident of the scale of the one unfolding in the gulf."

So, how come the multiple regulations and government agencies that are supposed to be watching the oil companies and their regulations didn't stop this from happening?

I don't hear many people making a case that BP should be unregulated, so your straw man is already leaning over a bit before you even try and knock him down. But if you're trying to make the case that government regulation would have stopped this disaster, you really should take into consideration the fact that these agencies are regulated, their well-trained government agents determined three times that this oil spell was not likely to occur, and even exempted them from some of the regulations. What good is an oversight board that can be bought?

Libertarianism does not mean corporatism, as much as you would like to believe. In general, it's the belief that even if you could construct the perfect government program, greed and incompetence will eventually sabotage its operations.

Tinker v Des Moines (393 US 503 [1969])

Opinion of the Court: "First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

But you would know that if you actually, oh I don't know, studied or something...

"I wish I had the money to buy the laws I want."

Again, hilarious that the government is so easy to buy, but it's the corporations that are the evil ones for doing it, and not the government that allows these laws to be purchased.

Let me see if I've got this right:

1. Government law caps the liability of BP to $75 M under Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund.
2. Government fails to properly tax the profit of BP.
3. Government takes on responsibilities like cleanup that should be BP's.
4. Government funnels money from taxpayers to BP allowing them to profit from good times while avoiding costs of bad times.

And your conclusion to this is about how evil BP is, and not how the government enables each of these to occur?