The fact that they are privately owned is the reason why they are even capable of caring about things besides profit above all else. Large groups of people like boards of directors and shareholders are only capable of caring about things in their lowest common denominator that virtually every person cares about, such as having more money.

Note how all VC-owned and publicly traded companies behave like perfectly predictable clones of one another. They are all just apparatuses for money production, with the actual product they sell, their literal means of making the money, an afterthought.

What will happen is that the corporation will whine all the way to the Supreme Court about free speech. Awww, it thinks its people!

Its crazy that they even have to. The laws that prohibited this exist already, but in one of the most disastrous bad faith court rulings in modern history, “artificial persons” came into being as a legal term about 100 years ago.

Sane and good faith people know there is no such thing.

I think that this inability to compete stems from a cultural aversion to reinvestment among those in the business world.

If these cars are making them those tiny or even negative margins at these prices that look like mortgages, they would benefit from evaluating themselves from top to bottom:

• Would our costs diminish over time if we invested in our build infrastructure more?
• Are we including features, amenities, and adornments that negatively impacting margins, affordability, and overall sales volume?
• Do we have institutional inefficiencies from previous mergers and acquisitions that we have never completed and reorganized even decades after they were complete?
• Are we as competitive on quality, safety, and other influential metrics as we could be?
• Are we innovating in ways people are influenced by?
• Is our executive pay reasonable for the value they bring to our company?
• Are our advertising, secondary business units, and other costly programs generating the return on the investments that we hoped for?

I believe that companies that grow to the size and influence that these have, they uniformly develop pathological behaviors and methods centered around maximizing value extraction from the business entity and dictating terms to the market they “serve”. Soul-searching questions like those above, and really any sentiment toward genuine investment and betterment at all become foreign, radical, and distasteful to them and their supporters. They then shuffle along for potentially decades after they have essentially died, persisting on critical mass alone until the market is finally disrupted enough where that alone can’t save them. BYD may be heavily subsidized, but they’re also comparatively new and young, able to innovate and respond to market demands, fundamental practices their older monopolistic competitors have long ago lost interest in doing.

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So, they’re misappropriating funds toward ends that their constituents explicitly rejected, and intentionally making an end run around organizational policy. This sounds like an open and shut case for immediate termination with cause, as well as likely grounds for a civil suit and maybe even criminal charges.

The malfeasance is not surprising, but a lack of disciplinary action and termination are, since inaction is tacit acceptance and a bad look for elected officials. I don’t think even the police union would take that “wrongful termination” case.

The domestic automakers have become hopelessly addicted to American oligopoly profit margins, and have entirely forgotten how to compete for business and win on merit.

If they went back and read one of those old boring economics textbooks, they would learn that you can successfully operate on a reasonable margin and lock in repeat business by establishing a good reputation and overall being desirable.

Competing nations subsidizing their industry is what tools like trade restrictions and tariffs are for, of course, but they are tools meant to level the playing field, not to pick winners and losers. Banning the sale of products like the Toyota Hilux and the whole BYD product line is simply naked cowardice manifested through regulatory capture.

You know what they say: “if you can’t beat 'em, pay the government to beat 'em.”

The required obligations of the USPS do hamstring them competitively in some areas, that is true. That said, I don’t believe their charter requires them to permit repackaging and reselling their service.

Since this is a tax-subsidized public amenity, it strikes me as an abuse of the commons to allow a shipping company to ship things on someone else’s behalf using the USPS. It seems directly analogous to digging up the flowers in the park and selling them.

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And on episode 48,942 of “Don’t Put Things on the Internet for No Reason”:

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The thing is, theres not even a point in banning private competition. I believe somehow it got insinuated that my shower thought also suggested banning private competition, but that wasn’t my intention.

The USPS is subsidized, tax exempt, a subsidiary of a bigger organization, and has built in economies of scale. If someone can compete on that super skewed playing field, more power to them! A side benefit is that private competitors being able to win on price or service despite USPS’s huge advantages all but proves the USPS is dropping the ball, corrupt, or both; it’s a built-in alarm.

The whole body text was the qualifiers for the subject line. It’s saved above; we dont have to argue about it, we can just read it.

That is true, but the market overlap between the USPS and, say, FedEx and UPS, is indicative of a failure of government in that arena, in my opinion.

The USPS service is tax subsidized and benefits from tax exemption and de facto huge economies of scale. The fact that those for-profit enterprises can compete on price at all in that direct like-for-like competition is dubious and indicative of a failure of the USPS to act per its national charter, as a public service.

The existence of direct competitors to the government’s are indicative of, but not tantamount to a government failure, yes. If a tax-subsidized government service leaves so much room in the market that a direct, like-for-like competing business can profitably exist, it is hard to envision how that could be so without the government service being a failure in some way.

The international shipper’s logistics would have to be theirs to handle, just as they are today. Any inefficiencies would be passed on to the consumer, as always, and more efficient shippers with better logistics can win on price with their lower overhead.

My statement was qualified to include edge cases. If you want your product shipped with special care, or with special considerations like refrigeration, or in a time frame shorter than is expectable via bulk mail, then there would be plenty of market for those.

For standard shipping, it is less that I think there is a problem with private entities existing in the space, but that few, if any actually would exist if there was and had always been a national comparable alternative, like there are no non-municipal water services but theoretically could be if not for lack of demand.