Since Margaret Thatcher’s British reforms in the 1980s, more than $3 trillion in government businesses have been privatized around the world, and few have been renationalized. Privatization simply works.

Two decades ago, the Clinton administration proposed restructuring our air traffic control (ATC) system. The idea was to create a self-funded outfit separate from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The problem was that “The FAA has been a big, bungling bureaucracy,” noted the spokesman for the controllers’ union in 1994.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is losing billions of dollars a year. The government company that delivers “snail mail” is losing out to email and other types of electronic communication. First-class mail volume fell from a peak of 104 billion pieces in 2000 to just 64 billion pieces by 2014.

With the rise of electronic communications, the volume of snail mail has fallen precipitously, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been losing billions of dollars. The 600,000-worker USPS is an unjustified legal monopoly that is heavily subsidized. It is a bureaucratic dinosaur that Congress should put on the way to extinction.

The federal government owns more than one quarter of the land in the nation, about 640 million acres. The holdings are concentrated in the West, where it owns about half of the 11 westernmost states.

The federal government owns more than one quarter of the land in the nation, about 640 million acres. The holdings are concentrated in the West, where it owns about half of the 11 westernmost states.

The solution to this giant mess

After Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, it is now Italy’s turn to privatize its postal service. It seems that even “old Europe” welfare states are more reform-minded on some economic matters than Congress and the current U.S. administration.

Five years ago, Bob Poole and I wrote that Canada’s privatized air traffic control (ATC) system would be “a very good reform model for the United States.” U.S. policymakers—including the chairman of the House committee that oversees ATC—are now coming around to that view.

A common feature of Obama administration economic policies is the use of government coercion. The Obamacare health law mandated that individuals buy insurance. The administration’s tax increases grabbed more earnings from millions of people. And federal agencies are imposing an increasing pile of labor, environmental, and financial regulations on businesses.