A recent headline blared: “Labor shortages end when wages rise.”

Gosh, Captain Obvious, what an amazing discovery! Someone notify the Nobel Prize committee, for surely this revolutionary revelation will win this year’s prize in economics. Better yet, someone notify that gaggle of Republican governors whose theory of labor economics begins and ends with the medieval demand that workers be whacked with a stick to make them do what the bosses want.

At issue is the furious complaint by restaurant chains, nursing homes, Big Ag, and other low-wage employers that they have a critical labor shortage. It seems that millions of workers today are hesitant to take jobs because there’s no affordable childcare, or the jobs they’re offered expose them and their families to COVID-19, or the work itself is abusive and demeaning… or all of the above.

Business chieftains wail that they’ve been advertising thousands of jobs for waiters, poultry workers, nursing assistants, and such, but they can’t get enough takers. So, corporate-serving governors have rushed to their rescue. Shouting “Whack ‘em with a stick,” these mingy politicians are stripping away jobless benefits, trying force workers to take any crappy job they’re offered. It gives new meaning to the term “workforce.”

But wait, there’s an honest way to get the workers they need: Offer fair wages! As the owner of a small chain of restaurants in Atlanta notes when he stopped lowballing wages he not only got the workers he needed, but “We started to get a better quality of applicants.” That translated to better service, happier customers, and more business.

The real economic factor in play here is not wages, but value. If you treat employees as cheap, that’s what you’ll get. But if you view them as valuable assets, that’s what they’ll be – and you’ll all be better off.

Corporate ideologues never cease blathering that government programs should be run like a business.

Really – what businesses would they choose? Pharmaceutical profiteers? Big Oil? Wall Street money manipulators? High tech billionaires? Airline price gougers?

The good news is that the great majority of people aren’t buying this corporatist blather, instead valuing institutions that prioritize the Common Good. Thus, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans have stunned smug right-wing privatizers by specifically declaring in a recent poll that our US Postal Service should not be “run like a business.” Indeed, an overwhelming majority, including half of Republicans, say mail delivery should be run as a “public service,” even if that costs more.

In fact, having proven that this 246-year-old federal agency can consistently and efficiently deliver to 161 million homes and businesses day after day, it’s time to let the agency’s trusted, decentralized, well-trained workforce provide even more services for our communities. How about “postal banking?” Yes, the existing network of some 31,000 post offices in metro neighborhoods and small towns across America are perfectly situated and able to provide basic banking services to the one-out-of-four of us who don’t have or can’t afford bank accounts. The giant banking chains ignore these millions, leaving them at the mercy of check-cashing exploiters and payday loan sharks.

The Post Office can offer simple, honest banking, including small-dollar checking and savings accounts, very-low-interest consumer loans, low-fee debit cards, etc. The goal of postal banking is not to maximize corporate profits, but public service. Moreover, there’s nothing new about this – our post offices served as banks for millions of us until 1967, when Wall Street profiteers got their enablers in Congress to kill the competition.

We The People own this phenomenal public asset. To enable it to work even better for us, go to AGrandAlliance.org.

When Donald Trump declared he would fix the US Postal Service, he was using the word “fix” the same way veterinarians do when you bring in your dog.

Trump wasted an inordinate amount of his presidential power and prestige in a failed attempt to neuter an agency that literally delivers for the people. Extraordinary postal workers move our letters and packages by truck, car, airplane, boat, motorbike, mule – and, of course, by foot – to any address across town or across the country. Both essential and effective, it’s the most popular federal agency, with 91 percent of the public approving its work. Thus, an uproar of protests killed Trump’s attempt to gut it.

When it comes to bad public policy, however, failure is just a way of saying, Let’s try the back door. Trump was defeated, but he left behind an undistinguished Postmaster General named Louis DeJoy, who had only two qualifications for the job: He was a Trump mega-donor, and he was a peer of corporate powers that’ve long wanted to privatize the Postal Service. In March, before the new Biden presidency had taken charge of the postal system, DeJoy popped through the back door with his own “10-year-plan” to fix the agency.

Rhetorically, his plan promised to “achieve service excellence” by making mail delivery more “consistent” and “reliable.” How? By consistently cutting service and reliably gouging customers. Specifically, DeJoy proposed to close numerous mail processing facilities, eliminate jobs, reduce Post Office hours of service, and cut the standard of delivering our first-class mail from three days to five. Oh, also: Raise stamp prices.

Delivering lousy service at higher prices is intended to destroy public support for the agency, opening up the mail service to takeover by private profiteers. That’s the real DeJoy plan. And who gets joy from that?