Why should we be subsidizing rural communities with free services that are terrible for the environment? If people want the benefits of modern civilization like air travel and grocery stores, they should move to cities. We are doing enough harm to the world in cities, we don't need to encourage sprawl even more.
Have you ever, like, left the city, man? Do you really think everyone can just live in the city without anyone out in the rural areas, you know, growing your fucking food?
Everyone hates government spending, until they want another handout.
We already massively subsidize rural living costs, stop that and the free market would raise wages to compensate without the need for government intervention.
If you think the free market would serve markets better, then why are there food deserts?
The truth is that the free market optimises for maximised ROI to the exclusion of all else.
There used to be a lot of smaller retailers serving communities - smaller markets, corner stores, delis, etc.
Large retailers came in and set up super stores which offered comparable goods at lower prices (due to the larger purchasing power and ability to take a local loss subsidised by other areas).
Once the local retailers were run out of business - the business eventually looked at what stores wern't turning enough profit and shut them down. After all, there's no local competition - customers will be required to go further.
This lead to lots of local unemployment and communities in which it's impossible to get food and other necessities locally.
In a free market, wages only rise where the business doesn't have control over the market. Once they do (through consolidation and driving out competitors) - wages drop, positions disappear, and conditions degrade.
Food deserts in urban areas are a direct result of people’s spending habits. There is plenty of people, but stores don’t stock products people don’t buy. Further if they did it would just go to waste.
If you want root causes, I would propose it’s a combination of subsidies on other foods combined with the reduced taste of modern fruits and vegetables.
The "free market" is a myth. Do you have a mortgage? Do you drive a car? Do you use the internet? Do you eat food? Do you spend money? Go to national parks? Drink water?
You are the recipient of govt subsidies. We are a society and as such, some things are more valuable than people are willing to pay for them, but yet still essential to keeping society functioning.
Sure we’re a society, but we’re not a post scarcity society and wasteful programs divert money from things that are more important. When we have guaranteed lunches for every school student, then we can talk about subsidizing services for people in rural areas. (Who often aren’t exactly poor, because of the massive subsidies we pay for agriculture.)
> When we have guaranteed lunches for every school student, then we can talk about subsidizing services for people in rural areas.
Why do these have to be a one or the other?
It's like the argument of "Why are we doing stuff in space while we still have poor people".
As a society we're capable of solving multiple problems simultaneously.
Many farmers are going out of business because of major corporations driving out independent farmers.
There's huge numbers of farmers that are being required to undertake terrible short-sighted practices because that's what they're contractually required to do for $BrandName to buy their product.
As for 'not exactly poor' - no, they're the modern working class, for the most part. They're asset rich, but free cashflow low, and operate in conditions that are highly unpredictable, and much of their ability to turn a profit is based entirely on things out of their control. They depend on huge amounts of credit to buy the machinery and resources they need to operate.
You can get voters to part with only so much of their own money to help other people. You can always appeal to them for more, but in the meantime you need to be spending what you’ve got effectively.
For individual issues it’s not one or the other, but collectively it becomes that way due to finite resources. In a finite economy wasteful spending ends up costing lives in the short and long term.
Subsidies rarely help people in the long term because the markets adapt. Increase corn production and prices drop to match, but now you need to dump all that food on the market. Worse this is directly resulting in increased obesity and related health issues.
Many of the problems that we have are not so simple as finite resources. It's like those glib articles about how we could completely solve world hunger with a mere $50 billion or whatever.
There is plenty of food and money to go around, but the complexities of getting it there, navigating the politics, culture and myriad of other issues are the real barriers.
Which is why it is so short sighted to think we should only spend money on the most pressing issue first, until it is solved.
We need to have at least some people living in small towns and sparsely populated areas to produce food and manage natural resources that cities depend on.
Then the government can pay the people in rural areas enough cash to fly in food, or enough to pay for prices high enough to make it worthwhile to open a grocery store.
Costs should be as transparent as possible. If there is low supply and high demand, you can increase supply by moving the prices up.
Alternatively, people in rural areas have to charge far more money for what they sell.
Everything you say sounds good in theory, until you spend a bit of time studying the history of economic policies. It's...really fucking complicated, which is why nobody really knows what they're doing (I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash?). But what you're proposing is the sort of thing that works with a small group of people, but then as you scale more and more you realize there are so many complicating factors you never thoughts of - not just resources but political alliances! Oftentimes there are military reasons for these justifications. One of the reasons high-fructose corn syrup is subsidized in the United States is so the US would not be dependent upon Cuba for its sugar supply back when Cuba was a communist country. One of the main motivations of the international freeway system is emergency runways for military planes. And while many subsidies are controversial, such as corn and soy, nobody can deny that we have all the corn and soy we need and it's all affordable - which was always the goal.
The truth about subsidies is simple: they're too fucking complicated to make meaningful generalizations. Each case really is unique enough it needs its own context, analysis, and decision for what's best.
I agree with your sentiment, but I encourage you to really dive into the details of any economic subsidy and realize how many confounding factors there are. There's the old economics joke "it works in practice, but not in theory" for a reason.
> I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash?
I agree with the spirit of the post - subsidies should be implemented for non-economic reasons and are therefore justified with arguments that say there are other good reasons to pay the price.
But this specific example isn't the best example because the stock market is a competitive human-driven environment where if a signal is predictive people will make money off it until it stops being predictive.
That is quite different from real-world processes where the laws of physics tend to remain in effect no matter how many what people figure out. Eg, resource depletion behaves differently to the loss of signal in a stock market.
Fair point, I could've chosen a better example. I was trying to point out an obvious shortcoming of economists anyone could understand, rather than keep the example in line with the rest of the comment.
