That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's prisoners dilemma, but the game doesn't end. Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)?
That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.
1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.
2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.
My experience, having come from Appalachian stock and escaping to New York City, is that urbanites are more open to new experiences and ideas, they see different people and slices of their culture all the time. They are more likely to go to college, further increasing their experience of new ideas.
Rural folk are insulated from the world outside the area they live in. They're mired in conservatism and the past. They suffer from brain drain because most people, once they've been exposed to fresh ideas and people via college, tend to become more "worldly" and don't necessarily want to return to their one stop sign town with its extremely limited social life, culture, and job prospects. They often never master their fear of the other, because they see everyone who is not them AS the other.
100% agree with the example of someone's tree on their 200 acre farm. However, if I have a dying tree that's a risk to falling on my neighbor's house, it would far less tyrannical for the neighbor to force me to remove the tree through the government. Proximity to others plays a big role.
The neighbor wouldn't be the tyrannical one. And, there's better solutions - put the liability for the tree on the person whose property it's on. That's a fair assignment of responsibility. I do think it would be tyrannical for the government to declare that all trees must be removed if they meet certain criteria.
Going back to the tree example, if a tree were to fall on the house, even if all the repairs were paid for by the tree owner, the loss in time and inconvenience will not be offset. There is also the chance that something personal is damaged and no amount of money can replace it. It is better if the tree never falls on the house in the first place.
This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?
For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?
Consequentialist reason: you don't put barriers and friction in front of (e.g.) biotech and drug innovation. See the pandemic for this (FDA has killed approximately a million people alone by preventing covid vaccines from being available in the market sooner).
Deontological reason: you don't have the right to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies (w.r.t. products they want to consume, at their own risk, etc).
There's also regulatory capture, which reliably and predictably occurs in mixed economies (see e.g. public choice economics).
This does not seem like a reasonable conclusion.
In a counter-factual where (presumably) the FDA doesn’t regulate much, we don’t have any idea how many harmful drugs consumers would have been exposed to and the damage this would result in.
Nor do we know how many folks would have died of Covid after believing they were protected by whatever ineffective drugs or vaccines.
Nor do we know how many more people would refuse to take effective vaccines due to lack of confidence in them, which is a huge problem even with the current level of vetting.
Tree falls on house, tree owner doesn't want to pay their liability, what happens?
WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.
> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.
Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)
Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples that you happen to believe in; someone who requires everyone to agree about what's done with trees on your own property could well be considered tyrranical.
> One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another.
That's a cool observation that I'll keep in mind. However, in my experience, it's not been the primary reason. Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish (or just check out r/natureismetal). That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.