I want the text of that guarantee. What do I get if it doesn't become mandatory? And by when will it become mandatory?

Like the history of seat belt laws in the US.

Based on what? Saying there is zero chance of it being optional (once it exists) seems pretty extreme.

Zero chance. It will be optional in the way that TSA searches are optional at airports.

Public Safety, of course. Terrorists, child molesters, hate speech.

We'll have to be protected.

Really, this script writes itself.

Relax. Breathe. Take a walk through a park and smell the roses.

Don't let the fear and negative thoughts cloud your head constantly and ask yourself how you can be positive and productive, without polluting the conversation with baseless doom and gloom statements.

The US Postal Service has existed for over 200 years, and at no point has it become mandatory.

We could easily provide half a dozen other major government initiatives which intersect with commercial activity and do not seem remotely on track to mandatory usage.

What makes this particular initiative different? If the postal service were created today, would you also suspect that it would become mandatory in a matter of time?

Yes, but there also used to be competing post offices that were so profitable and efficient that they were able to offer three-cent stamps.

Read about it here: http://www.lysanderspooner.org/STAMP3.htm

Spooner's post office was so good that no one was really using the USPS any more. He was literally running them out of business.

That is, until Congress came in and said that what he was doing was illegal. Since then, there have been no alternative post offices.

Businesses like UPS and FedEx survive because of a loophole in the law that basically allows for parcel, but not post, shipping: http://mises.org/daily/3646

That said, they recently had a big regulatory battle between UPS and FedEx. I forget the specifics, but one business was being classified differently, and thus incurring higher operating costs than the other, simply because it was classified differently... In other words - punitive tax legislation. I forget exactly what happened there, and can't find a link at the moment buuuut:

The point is this: Your example of the post office is fundamentally flawed because it doesn't take into account that the post office is protected from market forces by legislation and thus, force.

The classification difference means That UPS is union and FedEx is not. UPS is not as profitable and is lobbying to get FedEx reclassified.

UPS turned a profit of $3.126 billion last year. FedEx made $1.321 billion. UPS has higher profit margins than FedEx as well.

Well, on the one hand, a legally-protected monopoly is not the same thing as mandatory. Anyway, UPS/Fedex/DHL may be operating under a loophole, but the loophole exists: it's easy to send a sheet of paper through services like those.

The kind of regulatory problems ("classified differently") you describe are unfortunate, but those affect all major industries and are not specifically relevant to whether using the postal service is being protected. In other words, either UPS or FedEx having regulatory advantages doesn't mean that the overall tax/regulation regime is constructed so as to give the Postal Service a market advantage.

edit: see protomyth's comment; the Postal Service is unionized, so if anything FedEx seems to have the market advantage here.

so, why hasn't email been made illegal? It's essentially free post, and the post office could argue that it's killing their revenues.

The postal service isn't as powerful a tool/threat to the political order as the internet.

Edit - And furthermore, it's a govt issued id to track all your online transactions. This is tax revenue waiting to happen.

I wish I could give you more Karma for that.

As soon as "approved id" exist, the liability for allowing comments "without approved id" will skyrocket.

It's comments like this that make me miss downvoting here.