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>I'd argue you need to think about climate change and whether the US will continue to subsidize rural life. Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-cent

>I'd argue you need to think about climate change and whether the US will continue to subsidize rural life. Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-centric thinker. Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. Food, fiber, fuel, etc come from the rural reaches. Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities. There is a gross misunderstanding between urban and rural citizens of the complexity of their interactions, and it's near the core of our current political polarization.

DaltonCoffee 5y ago
Increasingly, many of these rural primary industries will need on site tech workers as well. Rural Canada is where I'm located at the moment. I tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.
- sojournerc 5y ago
  How can you say unsustainable when rural communities are where food comes from? Mass famine is unsustainable...
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    I wouldn't call them "unsustainable" because even though I disagree with the subsidies I think they're pretty easy to sustain. But your reasoning makes no sense. You don't need subsidies to have food. Here's a study on farm subsidies that found that removing them would increase prices only slightly for most goods: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Farticles%2F9009-study-finds-link-between-farm-subsidies-food-prices https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Fa... > The impact of premium subsidies – which work as discounts on the amount that farmers pay for crop insurance - varies widely depending on the crop and the policy. The price of corn, which is primarily used for livestock feed, would rise by nearly 5 percent if the subsidy were withdrawn, which would hurt livestock operations as well as foreign customers and ethanol producers. > Lusk says that removing subsidies would lead to at least small price increases for all foods, with the largest increase, of 1 percent, for eggs. Meat prices would be about 0.55 percent higher. Fruit and vegetable growers also benefit from the insurance, so prices for those crops would rise by 0.67 percent, Lusk found. The price of dairy products would be 0.14 percent higher.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The argument is you can’t have cities without rural areas supplying what they need. To disprove that you need cities that are self-sufficient. Subsidies don’t matter in that question.
      - TulliusCicero 5y ago
        Uhh no, who was arguing that you can have cities without anyone in rural areas? This just looks like another ridiculous straw man.
        bombcar 5y ago
        > cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state Was what the whole thread started with.
        TulliusCicero 5y ago
        That says nothing about there being nobody in rural areas, just fewer people, and it being an unsustainable welfare state obviously refers to the current subsidies. So yeah, it was a straw man on your part.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Cities are the centers of knowledge work and financialization, not heavy industries and agriculture people need to survive. Humanity could live without cities, we did before, but it couldn’t live without what makes cities possible from afar.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    Somehow I doubt that GP was arguing that literally 0% of the population would be outside of cities.
  - analog31 5y ago
    Try tilling 40 acres with a horse. Imagine getting sick, or giving birth. We lived without cities, but with a vastly lower population and quality of life. Things like knowledge work and financialization are what made possible great ventures such as energy distribution, transportation, mechanized farming, medicines, and so forth. I'm not sure agriculture would even sustain the existing rural population without the infrastructure of a complex modern economy. We're all in this together.
- justin66 5y ago
  > tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency This is why cities came about in the first place. > that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state. It's not the case that all rural areas are subsidized in the way those in the US often are.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
It's important to understanding how just wrong the thinking behind this comment is. "Everyone needs X" does NOT mean that it's impossible for X to be subsidized, or for "the place that produces X" to be subsidized. > Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities. That's not how economics works. That's not how any of this works. If rural areas are getting a disproportionate amount of government spending, then they're (probably) getting subsidized. That they produce things that the urban dwellers need doesn't change that. Just like if a big city gets a huge federal grant for a new subway system, that's probably a subsidy*, even if the big city produces things that people in rural areas use. * Though you can argue that the question of whether something is a subsidy is really more about whether the area gets a certain amount of money in total, rather than claiming any form of federal/state spending is a subsidy automatically
- refurb 5y ago
  Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc. Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    > Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy. It's both, actually. Just like if the government started paying for free, say, cloud storage, regardless of where anyone lives, that'd be a population subsidy on the consumer side, and an area/industry-specific subsidy on the producer side. > Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc. Irrelevant. People need transportation, too, but if the government starts buying people bikes and cars, that's a subsidy. Note that nobody's calling for the federal government to spend zero money in rural areas, when they talk about subsidies, they usually mean spending a disproportionate amount of money there. What "disproportionate" means is itself a question -- I think the most logical definition is "gets more federal $ in spending than they send to DC in tax revenue" but you could argue otherwise.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
justin66 5y ago
> Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. Food, fiber, fuel, etc come from the rural reaches. We pay a premium to buy food from the rural US in the form of common import tariffs that stifle or eliminate competition at the expense of the consumer and to the benefit of agricultural interests, and of course, taxes that subsidize agriculture. Large volumes of food need to come from some rural area, but if left to its own devices, the market would never demand that so much of it come from the rural US, or that the rural US make so much from the crops it produces. That's presumably some of what the OP was hinting at.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  Exactly. It's bizarre how often you see people arguing as if a lack of rural or farm subsidies would suddenly mean food disappearing.
  - ochoseis 5y ago
    The core function of the government is to provide basic necessities to its constituents. In other words, guaranteeing a food supply is a critical national interest and there’s no better way than to incentivize home-grown food.
    - landemva 5y ago
      The primary function of government was to protect liberty. The USA liberty experiment is nearly done.
      - gameman144 5y ago
        These two go hand-in-hand. As a whole-cloth believer in government's main goal being the protection of rights, I'd propose that it's pretty tough to guarantee those rights if you have invading armies or revolting citizens. Guaranteeing stability for the nation (in economic, military, and civic spaces) is needed, even if only as a means to protect liberty.
majormajor 5y ago
Rural communities are providing a subsidy to urban communities by ... selling them things? Isn't "charging money for" just about the opposite of subsidizing? Food is necessary; that does not mean that the US's rural communities in their current form are all necessary or even that they're unsubsidized. Food is an incredibly substitutable market, you'd expect the market to push prices down to a minimum.
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  This isn't as clear cut as you are making it. A lot of infrastructure haa pushed the price of food down. As prices go down, so do margins. Making a living as a farm hand has better margins without the interstate highway system for example. The supposed "subsidies" to rural areas are the cost of creating the low prices which cities also reap a lot of benefit from. You in fact could not easily substitute rural monoculture for something else. Not at today's prices.
- 015a 5y ago
  In your worldview: the government subsidizes rural life by... building roads? Making gas cheaper? How does all the food grown in rural areas make it into cities? Not by teleportation; by being loaded into semis, driven on roads, using gas. There's a cost. When roads get worse, when gas is more expensive; food gets more expensive; and it gets more expensive for cities more than it gets more expensive for rural areas. That's... subsidizing. For cities. We live in an interconnected economic system. The fact that cities make more tax revenue, then export some of that tax revenue to rural areas to support their public infrastructure, does not mean cities are subsidizing rural areas. It means that cities need rural areas to survive, or at the very least, to keep costs affordable.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I even check led the dictionary to be sure, but no, that is not subsidizing.
- gameman144 5y ago
  > Food is an incredibly substitutable market, you'd expect the market to push prices down to a minimum. This is largely the reason why we have subsidies for farming: we're not okay with substituting domestic agriculture for foreign imports, due to the risks involved. Consider the case of manufacturing, which is also a largely substitutable market. In the late 20th and early 21st century, the USA hollowed out loads of our manufacturing hubs in pursuit of lower prices, and this worked as advertised; costs dropped! With circumstances changing and a desire to perform more domestic manufacturing, though, we've lost a lot of our options. The USA has lost a lot of manufacturing nous and industry momentum, meaning that there's a lot of upstart cost to get back into the game. While subsidizing an industry may not be efficient from a global market perspective, it can be very sensible from a national policy perspective, since it means that you can build an experienced workforce and institutional knowledge within a given domain.
scythe 5y ago
>Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-centric thinker. Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. This is a thread about someone who wants to do computer work remotely in a "rural tech community". I have a hard time seeing what that has to do with farms. Small towns can be sustainable. The problematic sort of development is the purely residential carscape built just outside of town but driving in to use any services. See e.g. Wattsville, VA with attendant gated community Trail's End, featuring half the local population and one small overpriced convenience store. https://postimg.cc/vx4Ws884 https://postimg.cc/vx4Ws884

DaltonCoffee 5y ago

Increasingly, many of these rural primary industries will need on site tech workers as well. Rural Canada is where I'm located at the moment. I tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.

sojournerc 5y ago
How can you say unsustainable when rural communities are where food comes from? Mass famine is unsustainable...
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  I wouldn't call them "unsustainable" because even though I disagree with the subsidies I think they're pretty easy to sustain. But your reasoning makes no sense. You don't need subsidies to have food. Here's a study on farm subsidies that found that removing them would increase prices only slightly for most goods: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Farticles%2F9009-study-finds-link-between-farm-subsidies-food-prices https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Fa... > The impact of premium subsidies – which work as discounts on the amount that farmers pay for crop insurance - varies widely depending on the crop and the policy. The price of corn, which is primarily used for livestock feed, would rise by nearly 5 percent if the subsidy were withdrawn, which would hurt livestock operations as well as foreign customers and ethanol producers. > Lusk says that removing subsidies would lead to at least small price increases for all foods, with the largest increase, of 1 percent, for eggs. Meat prices would be about 0.55 percent higher. Fruit and vegetable growers also benefit from the insurance, so prices for those crops would rise by 0.67 percent, Lusk found. The price of dairy products would be 0.14 percent higher.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The argument is you can’t have cities without rural areas supplying what they need. To disprove that you need cities that are self-sufficient. Subsidies don’t matter in that question.
    - TulliusCicero 5y ago
      Uhh no, who was arguing that you can have cities without anyone in rural areas? This just looks like another ridiculous straw man.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        > cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state Was what the whole thread started with.
        TulliusCicero 5y ago
        That says nothing about there being nobody in rural areas, just fewer people, and it being an unsustainable welfare state obviously refers to the current subsidies. So yeah, it was a straw man on your part.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Cities are the centers of knowledge work and financialization, not heavy industries and agriculture people need to survive. Humanity could live without cities, we did before, but it couldn’t live without what makes cities possible from afar.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  Somehow I doubt that GP was arguing that literally 0% of the population would be outside of cities.
- analog31 5y ago
  Try tilling 40 acres with a horse. Imagine getting sick, or giving birth. We lived without cities, but with a vastly lower population and quality of life. Things like knowledge work and financialization are what made possible great ventures such as energy distribution, transportation, mechanized farming, medicines, and so forth. I'm not sure agriculture would even sustain the existing rural population without the infrastructure of a complex modern economy. We're all in this together.
justin66 5y ago
> tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency This is why cities came about in the first place. > that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state. It's not the case that all rural areas are subsidized in the way those in the US often are.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

It's important to understanding how just wrong the thinking behind this comment is. "Everyone needs X" does NOT mean that it's impossible for X to be subsidized, or for "the place that produces X" to be subsidized. > Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities. That's not how economics works. That's not how any of this works. If rural areas are getting a disproportionate amount of government spending, then they're (probably) getting subsidized. That they produce things that the urban dwellers need doesn't change that. Just like if a big city gets a huge federal grant for a new subway system, that's probably a subsidy*, even if the big city produces things that people in rural areas use. * Though you can argue that the question of whether something is a subsidy is really more about whether the area gets a certain amount of money in total, rather than claiming any form of federal/state spending is a subsidy automatically

refurb 5y ago
Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc. Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > Subsidizing agriculture isn’t a “rural” subsidy, it’s a “population” subsidy. It's both, actually. Just like if the government started paying for free, say, cloud storage, regardless of where anyone lives, that'd be a population subsidy on the consumer side, and an area/industry-specific subsidy on the producer side. > Cities literally can’t sustain themselves without outside inputs - food, building materials, energy, etc. Irrelevant. People need transportation, too, but if the government starts buying people bikes and cars, that's a subsidy. Note that nobody's calling for the federal government to spend zero money in rural areas, when they talk about subsidies, they usually mean spending a disproportionate amount of money there. What "disproportionate" means is itself a question -- I think the most logical definition is "gets more federal $ in spending than they send to DC in tax revenue" but you could argue otherwise.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

justin66 5y ago

> Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. Food, fiber, fuel, etc come from the rural reaches. We pay a premium to buy food from the rural US in the form of common import tariffs that stifle or eliminate competition at the expense of the consumer and to the benefit of agricultural interests, and of course, taxes that subsidize agriculture. Large volumes of food need to come from some rural area, but if left to its own devices, the market would never demand that so much of it come from the rural US, or that the rural US make so much from the crops it produces. That's presumably some of what the OP was hinting at.

TulliusCicero 5y ago
Exactly. It's bizarre how often you see people arguing as if a lack of rural or farm subsidies would suddenly mean food disappearing.
- ochoseis 5y ago
  The core function of the government is to provide basic necessities to its constituents. In other words, guaranteeing a food supply is a critical national interest and there’s no better way than to incentivize home-grown food.
  - landemva 5y ago
    The primary function of government was to protect liberty. The USA liberty experiment is nearly done.
    - gameman144 5y ago
      These two go hand-in-hand. As a whole-cloth believer in government's main goal being the protection of rights, I'd propose that it's pretty tough to guarantee those rights if you have invading armies or revolting citizens. Guaranteeing stability for the nation (in economic, military, and civic spaces) is needed, even if only as a means to protect liberty.

majormajor 5y ago

Rural communities are providing a subsidy to urban communities by ... selling them things? Isn't "charging money for" just about the opposite of subsidizing? Food is necessary; that does not mean that the US's rural communities in their current form are all necessary or even that they're unsubsidized. Food is an incredibly substitutable market, you'd expect the market to push prices down to a minimum.

DubiousPusher 5y ago
This isn't as clear cut as you are making it. A lot of infrastructure haa pushed the price of food down. As prices go down, so do margins. Making a living as a farm hand has better margins without the interstate highway system for example. The supposed "subsidies" to rural areas are the cost of creating the low prices which cities also reap a lot of benefit from. You in fact could not easily substitute rural monoculture for something else. Not at today's prices.
015a 5y ago
In your worldview: the government subsidizes rural life by... building roads? Making gas cheaper? How does all the food grown in rural areas make it into cities? Not by teleportation; by being loaded into semis, driven on roads, using gas. There's a cost. When roads get worse, when gas is more expensive; food gets more expensive; and it gets more expensive for cities more than it gets more expensive for rural areas. That's... subsidizing. For cities. We live in an interconnected economic system. The fact that cities make more tax revenue, then export some of that tax revenue to rural areas to support their public infrastructure, does not mean cities are subsidizing rural areas. It means that cities need rural areas to survive, or at the very least, to keep costs affordable.
- watwut 5y ago
  I even check led the dictionary to be sure, but no, that is not subsidizing.
gameman144 5y ago
> Food is an incredibly substitutable market, you'd expect the market to push prices down to a minimum. This is largely the reason why we have subsidies for farming: we're not okay with substituting domestic agriculture for foreign imports, due to the risks involved. Consider the case of manufacturing, which is also a largely substitutable market. In the late 20th and early 21st century, the USA hollowed out loads of our manufacturing hubs in pursuit of lower prices, and this worked as advertised; costs dropped! With circumstances changing and a desire to perform more domestic manufacturing, though, we've lost a lot of our options. The USA has lost a lot of manufacturing nous and industry momentum, meaning that there's a lot of upstart cost to get back into the game. While subsidizing an industry may not be efficient from a global market perspective, it can be very sensible from a national policy perspective, since it means that you can build an experienced workforce and institutional knowledge within a given domain.

scythe 5y ago

>Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-centric thinker. Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. This is a thread about someone who wants to do computer work remotely in a "rural tech community". I have a hard time seeing what that has to do with farms. Small towns can be sustainable. The problematic sort of development is the purely residential carscape built just outside of town but driving in to use any services. See e.g. Wattsville, VA with attendant gated community Trail's End, featuring half the local population and one small overpriced convenience store. https://postimg.cc/vx4Ws884 https://postimg.cc/vx4Ws884