I recently read this article about the postal service, and there was one part that jumped out at me:

The USPS, a self-supporting government agency that receives no tax dollars, said it suffered a loss of $329 million in the first quarter of federal fiscal year 2011. That compared with a loss of $297 million a year earlier.

There are two things wrong with this statement. First, the USPS does receive tax dollars. The Postal Service Fund is a subsidy program established to  pay for postage-free mailing by the legally blind, pay the cost of election ballots, and keep open rural post offices.

Second, the USPS is not “self-sustaining” even if we ignore the contribution of the Postal Service Fund. Money is not the only means by which government benefits particular entities. Rules, regulations and laws are often also used to pick winners and losers. The USPS gets just such a benefit, and it’s a whopper: it is illegal for any other group than the USPS to deliver letters. They have a government granted and enforced monopoly, which refutes entirely the idea that they are “self-sustaining,”  at least in any meaningful sense of the phrase.