The Postal Service has been using the same arguments to justify its monopoly for 150 years. The arguments no longer wash. Researchers also found that real price reductions increased over time, suggesting that long-term adjustments to competition are important. There is no reason to believe that competition in postal services would not yield similar benefits to consumers. Postal delivery is structurally quite similar to trucking, which displayed some of the largest price reductions from deregulation.
Firms adjust to competition in a wide variety of ways.
Recent studies show that deregulation in the United States has caused firms to make innovations in marketing, to introduce new products and services, to make improvements in operations, to strengthen corporate governance, to improve service quality, to be more responsive to customers' desires, and to offer a broader array of price-service combinations. Such improvements to the postal industry would be music to the ears of many a customer. Second , basic notions of fairness imply that the cross-subsidy should be eliminated. To the extent that people make choices about where they live, they should assume the costs of that decision. Additionally, it is quite possible that the urban-rural subsidy results in wealth redistribution from poor to rich.