I ran into this sort of heavily individualistic attitude a lot when I was traveling around places in remote nature-y states like Utah, New Mexico, Arkansas, etc.
And I can empathize. Many people feel aggrieved that they work much harder for much less than people who live in coastal cities, and under much worse conditions. Honestly, I think that perspective is pretty accurate.
But there's also a refusal to see that people in those areas make enormous demands on the government to subsidize their preferred lifestyle in such remote areas. Roads, telecoms, and food/water/gas services cost money and make major impacts on the environment, but the same people complaining about big government will often use their next breath to grouse about bumpy roads and brag about how they abuse BLM lands as if they were their own private property. Sometimes it feels like you're trying to explain the tragedy of the commons to a locust.
Still, most people have a lot of respect and admiration for the land that they live and rely on. I was once talking to someone about the USFS' forest road system, and they said something like: "I know, isn't it terrific? I can just drive or bike out to where the trees and fish and deer are. But could you imagine if they tried to do that today? The environmentalists would shut 'em down and the conservatives would say it's too expensive!"
We really need fewer absolutists in our governance; there are plenty of things that most people agree on, but which are vetoed by the extreme wings of our two exclusive political parties.
Also, there really is something special about the remote wilderness, and whatever that something is, the American West exemplifies it. Some people seem to viscerally need wild spaces; they're part of what make us human, and they remind everyone that you are more of a guest than a landlord on Earth.
My "countryfolk" friends work long hours but are land-wealthy, spend copious time with family, and take month-long vacations to go hunting. They have it right, I tell myself as I pay down college debt in anticipation of house debt while sitting unpaid in traffic 2 hrs a day.
> But there's also a refusal to see that people in those areas make enormous demands on the government to subsidize their preferred lifestyle in such remote areas. Roads, telecoms, and food/water/gas services cost money and make major impacts on the environment....
Where do you think the food, water and gas come from in the first place? And how do you think they get to the cities? We can stop subsidizing that, I guess, but food, water and gas in cities is going to cost a hell of a lot more.
It seems like it's usually a cost per length/area problem. Cities are small, and they have a lot of people who pay taxes, so the marginal cost to pave a road between any two places and make regular deliveries along it is small. Frontier areas are enormous, and roads barely last a few decades before they need replacing. Moving goods and services to any one house or hamlet also adds a significant marginal cost to existing routes. I once saw an ambulance pull out of a small clinic and turn its lights on in New Mexico. I followed it along a highway at 75mph for over an hour (its lights flashing the entire time) before it took an exit to reach the emergency. The coverage in these areas is just abysmal, but I would guess that it's still pretty expensive per capita.
>Where do you think the food, water and gas come from in the first place? And how do you think they get to the cities? We can stop subsidizing that, I guess, but food, water and gas in cities is going to cost a hell of a lot more.
From my anecdotal experience, I don't think that most farmers would be in favor of ending domestic ag subsidies.
But I think you're on to something in saying that the negative externalities of cities aren't priced into our markets either. All of the pollution, noise, stress, congestion...those things should be subsidized for people who live in cities, but they aren't, and the resulting increase in the cost-of-living in cities relative to rural areas probably drives up prices for the specialized manufactured goods and services that everyone depends on.
> On a per-capita basis, people who live in cities generate less externalities than rural dwellers. So I'm not quite clear on your point.
Of course there's more externalities, 3% of the population feeds the other 97%. Cities consume all the food, water and gas that those "wasteful" rural folk produce for them. Interesting that we don't account for that and just attribute the externalities to them, as if that's the whole story.
Cities are certainly more efficient per capita, but they're not self-sustaining. If we demolished all those wasteful roads between cities and rural parts of the country, the cities would starve.
I was under the impression that most of what we consider rural populations are left overs from transportation arteries and extraction industries that popped all over the country during the industrial revolution. I thought the actual number of farmers is vanishingly small and I doubt it takes an entire 3% of the country to support a mostly automated industry.
The parent to you was trying to say we are somehow taking advantage of them. Before covad-19 at least, we could just buy food from some other place. We don't need a lot of the rural land. The same thing goes the other way, the people living in small town could get medical care from some international company, but it would cost way more than their subsidized us federal govt healthcare because in my hometown more than half the people are retired.
In washington state we have the same arguments. If you really want to make people in rural areas made, point out that we are subsidizing them. i'm not against building infrastructure that we all need. But lets be honest about it. A significant amount of tax revenue from Seattle goes out to pay for things in low population counties. It does against the dishonest ideaology that they are the real producers of things and we somehow take what they make. We need each other, but we city folk like me subsidize your local docs so they don't leave, subsidize your schools, and we pay for roads that are used to then get to timber to harvest.
> Frontier areas are enormous, and roads barely last a few decades before they need replacing.
I think the issue is that you need to have the roads in the rural and frontier areas to get the food to the cities, i.e. even if nobody lived there, you'd still need to maintain them until we switch to soylent green and the cities become self-sustainable.
The problem is that living in the countryside adds another layer of distribution, and it's the most inefficient layer given our direct to door expectations with receiving goods these days.
Some things come from the countryside, but not everything is produced in the same countryside, so you still need far off goods no matter where you live. However, everything comes to the city to be distributed regionally. Cities are huge nodes in our networks of economies. Every piece of whatever ordered from China, for example, has to first come through the port of LA.
So, it is better to live near that port, and where all of the disparate goods from the countryside are brought for market, than to live out in the countryside and demand these goods in existence right now in the city be hand delivered to your door in unincorporated New Mexico or wherever, one item at a time.
It is more efficient to live densely. You need to cover less ground to run utilites and provide services, and transportation costs to the environment are much lower. Human activity scars the land, and it is also better to keep those scars centered into one gash than to scar the entirety of the natural landscape so everyone can have their 100'x 250' parcel and not have to rub shoulders in an elevator.
The only reason those people are even there in the land is the federal army, sponsored mostly by taxes from the East of the country, killed off lots and lots of Mexicans and Native Americans until they gave up.
> But there's also a refusal to see that people in those areas make enormous demands on the government to subsidize their preferred lifestyle in such remote areas. Roads, telecoms, and food/water/gas services cost money and make major impacts on the environment
Isn't this the same argument that leads to the idea that Scandinavian socialist success is the result of having an umbrella of defense from the US that they do not have to pay for themselves?
The effective subsidies to rural living matter on a daily basis - rural life would essentially end without them.
If indeed it is true that the USA effectively subsidizes the defense needs of Scandanavia, there's no evidence that I am aware of that removing that subsidy would lead to an end to the Scandanavian countries. It would marginally increase the possibility that Russia might decide to annex part of Finland, perhaps, but this would still be extremely unlikely.
It's far from clear to me that most of the rural population, however you define it, is directly (and maybe not even indirectly) involved in agriculture. The census puts the rural population at 60 million. Self-employed nand family farm labor is at about 2 million, hired farm labor is about a little over a million, bringing the total for farms to a bit over 3 million. Granted, there's many other agriculturally related jobs that also exist in rural areas. I've heard an estimate that only about 1% of the population is now involved in food production overall, which would be about 30 million.
So at best we could say that the cities need about half the current rural population to feed them.
That's a glib assessment of course - it would imply no communities other than farms themselves. But I don't think its reasonable to assume or claim that most of the rural population is involved in things of direct importance to cities. Presumably there's some economic value, otherwise the population would drop even further, but its certainly not just food, and food by itself isn't a justification.
> That's a glib assessment of course - it would imply no communities other than farms themselves. But I don't think its reasonable to assume or claim that most of the rural population is involved in things of direct importance to cities. Presumably there's some economic value, otherwise the population would drop even further, but its certainly not just food, and food by itself isn't a justification.
It's not just food, to be sure. Gas, electricity, water, minerals and all sorts of other resources largely come from rural areas and are transported to urban areas.
> I don't think its reasonable to assume or claim that most of the rural population is involved in things of direct importance to cities.
Excluding the elderly, unemployed and children I'd say a vast majority of the rural population are very much involved in things of direct importance to cities.
If they don't want to sell us things, we can buy them from other places. This is all leading to the dissolution of the us. I'm getting to the point that I am tired of subsidizing the lifestyles of people living fantasies of self-protection in the countryside, including where I lived as a kid. Big cities (including the ones where I live) have a large amount of tax revenue that goes to pay for health care, hospitals, roads, bridges, education for people in small towns. My small town last all their factory jobs and it's increasingly just old people in a shrinking place.
>Also, there really is something special about the remote wilderness, and whatever that something is, the American West exemplifies it. Some people seem to viscerally need wild spaces; they're part of what make us human, and they remind everyone that you are more of a guest than a landlord on Earth.
Interesting how you point out mankind needs nature but in the same breath talk about all the infrastructure.
I have an off the grid property with no roads to it (legal easements but nothing improved) yet my nature is marred by a giant substation powering all the civilized parts where people build infrastructure. I can literally hear when the power demand increases from a half a mile away.
The irony is you think we demand the govt for something. The govt doesn't produce anything, except waste.
If we want a road out here we get a tractor and make one.
Here is an example of people producing infrastructure with no govt waste.
In the Wikipedia article you cite, the state Governor arranged the effort to make the road. How is that not government? I work in state government, and this type of thing (the state coordinates a bunch of private organizations towards a common goal) happens all the time.
Do you mean, "the way [my] state government handles contracts always leads to waste"? Because that's something worth discussing. It might sound like I'm splitting hairs because of course people speak in general terms to save time. But I've met too many people who think the government is literally incapable of doing something well.
Businesses are created by people who offer services / products for trade or money. Govt has nothing to do with that and in many cases (In the US) creates barriers to entry prohibiting private industry
> Govt has nothing to do with that and in many cases (In the US) creates barriers to entry prohibiting private industry
Nothing. Pretty strong and unorthodox stance. You can't think of a single thing the government does that permits advanced economies to exist? Or any economy, really?
the substation is part of a distributed system which powers the factories that make the truck you likely drive over your (unimproved) roads, not to mention the tractor you say you would use to make another one. it also powers the hospital where you'll end up after an accident or serious illness. it probably powers the building where government functions to act as a counter-weight to the behavior of selfish or ignorant individuals and corporations, because good luck with using your tractor to deal with a large company that decides to pollute your nearest river. they couldn't do that if there was no government (the cry of the pure libertarian)? just look back in history and around the world - this is delusional: there are always power imbalances and there are always people who left unchecked will be bad actors within communities of various sizes.
government is above all a solution to the problem of coordination. if you seriously believe that your life doesn't require solving any coordination problems that couldn't be dealt with using the neighborhood (physical) bulletin board, then i don't see how you're reading HN.
The point I was going to is there is a balance. The incorporated areas need to understand they need the unincorporated areas and folks need to have a symbiotic relationship.
Too many times people try to overlay what works in one area to one it doesnt.
Laws try to be global and that simply cannot work. Let the local govts manage their areas and get the federal govt out of managing states.
How much of NM is owned by BLM ? In AZ its ridiculous amount.
I have seen that sentiment about the BLM owning too much pushed a lot more following the lengthy velvet glove treatment of the Bundies (anyone in suburban or urban areas would have faced consequences well before millions of dollars in debts or years holding them and fleeing to a remote area would not help).
How exactly is the BLM holding vast amounts of marginal land and renting it cheaply a harm? Why is a large wilderness reserve an overstep or threat?
And I can empathize. Many people feel aggrieved that they work much harder for much less than people who live in coastal cities, and under much worse conditions. Honestly, I think that perspective is pretty accurate.
But there's also a refusal to see that people in those areas make enormous demands on the government to subsidize their preferred lifestyle in such remote areas. Roads, telecoms, and food/water/gas services cost money and make major impacts on the environment, but the same people complaining about big government will often use their next breath to grouse about bumpy roads and brag about how they abuse BLM lands as if they were their own private property. Sometimes it feels like you're trying to explain the tragedy of the commons to a locust.
Still, most people have a lot of respect and admiration for the land that they live and rely on. I was once talking to someone about the USFS' forest road system, and they said something like: "I know, isn't it terrific? I can just drive or bike out to where the trees and fish and deer are. But could you imagine if they tried to do that today? The environmentalists would shut 'em down and the conservatives would say it's too expensive!"
We really need fewer absolutists in our governance; there are plenty of things that most people agree on, but which are vetoed by the extreme wings of our two exclusive political parties.
Also, there really is something special about the remote wilderness, and whatever that something is, the American West exemplifies it. Some people seem to viscerally need wild spaces; they're part of what make us human, and they remind everyone that you are more of a guest than a landlord on Earth.