Postal van in Sundsvall, Sweden (wikimedia)

When considering a policy issue like the quality of mail delivery it’s often intriguing to ask oneself “how is this done in Scandinavia?” What appears to be the case is that the government of Denmark quasi-privatized its postal services, creating an independent corporation called Post Danmark that’s partially owned by a private equity firm, partially owned by the firm’s employees, and partially owned by the Danish state.

Meanwhile, Sweden has a state-run postal agency but a deregulated market in postal services. So the state-owned Posten AB needs to compete with a firm called Bring CityMail. Bring CityMail operates as a private company in Denmark and Sweden, but it’s actually a subsidiary of the Norwegian state postal service. Meanwhile, in order to better compete with this Norwegian juggernaut, Sweden’s publicly owned postal service and Denmark’s semi-public postal service are merging to form Posten Norden AB. This is going to be organized as a private firm, though a large share of the ownership will be in the hands of the Danish and Swedish governments.

International mergers of postal agencies seem to have a certain logic when you’re talking about very small countries that doesn’t necessarily apply to the United States. But I would say that one key thing here relates not so much to state ownership versus non-ownership, but to a regulatory climate that seems designed to promote meaningful competition between different mail delivery services regardless of ownership structure.

Of course part of the story with the USPS is that it’s a way of having the majority of Americans who live in metropolitan area subsidize the rural minority. I assume this same issue exists in Sweden and Norway which contain US-esque large sparsely populated hinterlands and I don’t know how they handle it. Providing subsidies for rural living doesn’t strike me as a particularly worthwhile policy objective, but given the strongly pro-rural bias of our political institutions it doesn’t seem avoidable either.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

Anyway,  there’s been a pretty lively debate raging between Yglesias, Douthat, Judis and Feeny. It’ll probably come as no surprise that I mostly agree with Douthat, if with a significant twist. It’s not that I put it past McCain’s people to race-bait, it’s that I really don’t care.

I think I should revise and extend my remarks on this score. “Race-baiting,” however defined, is not really the issue. Indeed, I tend to think that as a political concept it’s overblown. Barack Obama is a black man. This is obvious. People inclined to let this fact influence their vote — either those drawn to him or those repelled from him on account of his race — probably don’t need to be prompted or baited into doing so. The more important point is that race and racism have a large structural pull on the shape of American politics. In particular, they’re an obstacle for a politics of economic equality, security, and solidarity.

This happens through a number of mechanisms. One is that you have white Americans near the bottom of the economic spectrum who may be more inclined to identify on a personal level with whites near the top of the pyramid than with non-whites who are more similarly situated in terms of objective interests. Recall the great Gelman race/class master charts:

Poor Hispanics, poor Asians, poor African-Americans, and poor “others” are all very disinclined to vote Republican. But about half of poor non-Hispanic whites do. Conversely, very few rich African-Americans vote Republican, notwithstanding the general pro-GOP sympathies of rich non-Republicans. I don’t think anyone would take me to be saying anything especially controversial if I were to say that rich blacks’ aversion to the Republican Party is, in part, a matter of racial solidarity with the mostly non-rich black population trumping class solidarity with the mostly non-black rich population. But the same is true on the flip side — white racial solidarity trumping class solidarity is one of the reasons that poor whites are so relatively friendly to the Republican Party.

Another mechanism has to do with trust. Once upon a time there was a lot of concern with “welfare fraud.” Welfare fraud was a real phenomenon. And, clearly, being against fraud is not a racist sentiment as such. At the same time, children suffering lifelong handicaps in the struggle to build a decent life for themselves owing to growing up in conditions of deplorable poverty also was (and is) a very real problem. And when designing systems, it’s difficult to maximize the value of “giving all the help needed to everyone who needs it” and also maximize the value of making the system completely immune to fraud or abuse. When the recipients of help are people you find it easy to identify with, the tendency is to tell yourself sympathetic stories about their plight. When the recipients of help are people you find it difficult to identify with, you become much more skeptical — very eager to make sure that not one red cent is spent on an idler or a fraudster. Doing that becomes the most important thing, and that means that more legitimate needs wind up going unmet. And, again, it’s not racist to decide that you’re more interested in preventing fraud than in providing people with preventive health care — that’s a value decision. But it does seem that which values people prefer depends in part on racial and ethnic factors.

It’s not a coincidence that you tend to see more generous welfare states constructed in countries that have traditionally been homogeneous, or that in the US the South has both been the epicenter of racial animosity and the location of the least generous welfare states. One could arguably tell a story in which it’s the Swedes and the Finns who are the real racists here (letting Nordic genetic superiority blind them to the overarching merits of sink-or-swim individualism) but either way you’re going to get the result that racial and ethnic conflict is relevant to the politics of class and economics.

Reader J.F. has a question about my post on how not all government agencies are as bad as that one time the DMV really screwed up: “RE: AirForce, I agree with your broad point, but do you have any thoughts regarding the fact that the well run government agencies you mention are all military? Are civilian run agencies just never as good? And why is that? Further, should we ask the military to run our healthcare. I’m only half-kidding on that last one.”

First off, I would reject the premise. One of the examples I cited of an effective public institution is the Federal Reserve system. The very same conservatives who seem certain that the government would botch even the most minor regulatory tasks have pretty much no problem with the idea of the Fed setting interests rates that do an enormous amount to control the overall level of employment, GDP growth, and inflation in the country. And rightly so — the details of the Fed’s conduct over the past 20-30 years are certainly open to criticism, but they’ve definitely delivered shorter, shallower recessions than we had in the past and the very same Bush administration that put Michael Brown in charge of FEMA picked a new Fed chief whose decision-making regularly earns praise from Paul Krugman.

Beyond the Fed and the military there are lots of parts of the government that work quite well — we have bad schools and bad police departments in this country, but also good schools and good police departments. We fight forest fires with extraordinary skill and I’ve had great visits to any number of attractions run by the National Park Service.

And then, yes, there’s the military. But there’s no real mystery here as to why our very large military is also a reasonably high-performing government agency — it’s something our political leaders put a high priority on. This is similar to the Fed — political elites wouldn’t stand for staffing it with incompetents and know-nothings. Other agencies become patronage mills or suffer from funding shortfalls or deliberate sabotage. When the government is run by people who don’t want environmental regulations, civil rights law, or labor law to be enforced properly those things don’t happen. What’s more, a lot of the better public institutions — from the Fed to the Navy to state universities and so forth — are structured in special ways to try to insulate them from problematic forms of politicization.

This topic initially arose in the context of some snark about the evils of the government taking over the health care system, and my point wouldn’t be to say that government-run health care would necessarily be good but only that one could envision a wide range of outcomes. Were the government to start running American health care, it would be important to think about a lot of questions of institutional design to try to make sure that it ran health care well. In the real world, the government is already pretty heavily involved in the health care system in terms of regulating it and the main progressive legislative proposals all involve basically maintaining the current framework of a regulated-and-subsidized but privately owned-and-operated health care system so I’m not sure that this debate is all that relevant. In terms of the military running health care, though, the Veterans’ Administration provides excellent health care and I hear good things about the schools the DOD runs on military babes.