I can live high off the hog "in the black" too, until my credit card bill comes. The coming "bill" is the issue in Social Security.

Private and home schools are outperforming most public ones. But that's neither here nor there, I suppose.

Competing with the U.S. Post office in first class mail was punishable by fines and imprisonment, which is how it maintained its position for years. The free market routed around this legal restriction quite nicely. Notice that there is no stamp on this message. The truth is, that if all legal restrictions on postal activities were removed, the U.S. Postal Service could vanish in a puff of smoke, and after some hiccups, the economy would find alternatives in short order. In ten years you wouldn't even know it had been there. Less, if the infrastructure was bought out. Maybe stamps would cost a bit more. Maybe not. I bet there'd be less junk mail if mailers actually had to pay what it costs to transport it. The Post Office currently subsidized "junk mail" to the tune of over $12 billion a year.

And I see you run down the rest of the usual list. Roads, sewers, schools, etc. etc. You might want to also bring up fire departments, the police, garbage pickups, water service, and others.

Somehow nobody ever seems to notice that almost all the things on this standard laundry list are usually funded on the local or state level by property, gasoline and sales taxes, or just by my paying the damn bill when it arrives. In fact, I recently voted myself a local tax increase for my local schools, and a few years back voted for a local sales tax increase to improve local highways (the diamond-lane bait-and-switch came later, but that's another story.)

Local services, local funding. That's how its supposed to work. So when we're discussing the $2.5 trillion Federal Budget, you might want to draw up a different list.

And while you're making that list, you could look around you and make a similar list of the hundreds of things important to life, health and happiness that the private sector does a spectacular job of delivering.