Last week, the US Postal Service announced that it will end Saturday service, cut 150,000 jobs, and close thousands of post offices around the country, starting in August. Packages will still be delivered, but letters, utility bills, and your Netflix DVDs will only now arrive at fewer destinations on fewer days per week.

To supporters of the welfare state, this signals yet another incursion of the profit-driven corporate model into government services.

The postal service, after all, is not a corporation — it literally is part of the federal government’s executive branch, explicitly authorized by the constitution and tasked with providing universal and affordable mail service. While wealthy city-dwellers can arrange to have their correspondences FedExed or iPhoned, rural Americans and those with limited access to technology depend on the USPS for basic communication with the rest of the world.