Yes.

Edit: to be less snarky, there are plenty of examples of doing something inefficient for the benefit of society as a whole. The New Deal and the ADA are two examples that come to mind.

Unfortunately, we don’t do much of that anymore in the US.

We could do better, but there are still some contemporary examples. For instance it's costly to provide comprehensive medical care in rural areas. One of the effective functions of medicare / medicaid is to subsidize rural medical care.

We should minimize our eco-footprint with high density living, not subsidizing high environmental impact lifestyles.

How does the rural folk having high speed internet benefit society?

Let's cut off their electricity and phone too and forcibly relocate them. It's not like other countries haven't done that in the past. /s

We can just make them pay for it instead of mooching off everybody else.

Exactly. People in this thread are perfectly happy to throw unknown heaps of other people's money at the problem until it is solved. And it's not like the government has a track record of efficiently spending money in the first place.

Yeah let these city dwellers grow their own food. We got enough for ourselves, no need to sell it to them types. /s

When? I can't think of any examples of forced rural-urban migration other than the Highland Clearances in the UK, which isn't really comparable.

Pol pot did it in Cambodia

That was urban-rural migration.

Rural people need reliable access to power for farming.

Someone's gotta grow the food. Our farmers deserve Netflix.

And eDoctor visits, farmer forums, IoT data services, banking, accounting apps, etc

Or perhaps they deserve to be treated like adults and decide for themselves what infrastructure they want to pay for.

I think the larger point is that guaranteeing access ensures they have the opportunity to make that choice.

Enjoy starving to death then.

If farmers feel their lifestyle isn't good enough in proportion to the work they do, they should raise the prices of the food they sell, not get paid by the backdoor through subsidies.

A great idea! A terrific plan like this needs a clever name.

We could call it the Great Leap Forward, or maybe the Cultural Revolution.

Neither of those had anything to do with moving people from the countryside into the cities, as far as I'm aware. The Chinese Communist Party is still trying to suppress rural-urban migration (e.g., via hukou).

How do the food, livestock, minerals, and wood that grows in rural areas benefit society?

Those are priced into the economy. The value the cities provide is transferred to rural for food, livestock, and minerals.

Handing rural people an extra $50k in addition of the payment for the goods ands services to install the infrastructure doesn't seem right to me.

> How does the rural folk having high speed internet benefit society?

How does an urban population having high speed internet benefit society? Whatever your answer, that's the benefit for rural folks too.

One difference is that urban areas get that benefit with lower cost due to the inherent scaling available in dense population. The benefit might be the same, the cost is not.

I’d argue the isolated benefit is the same, but the network effect amplifies it. When a ton of people do music together, it becomes part of the culture. That effect is more difficult to scale in low density populations, which means their rate of improvement is probably lower.

> When a ton of people do music together, it becomes part of the culture.

I can't think of a better reason to subsidize the additional cost for rural broadband: without it, there is no nationally accessible "culture" that unifies us.

The utility market is generally a regulated monopoly. The market and govt both recognized the economies of scale with public infrastructure. As part of the tradeoff to be allowed to operate as a monopoly, utilities must also ensure rural or unprofitable customers still receive access. It’s all part of the deal and intrinsically tied to your point.

I agree with your basic point--and subsidies are a complicated topic. Cities can't exist in isolation.

That said, Starlink, and presumably competitors at some point, does change the game. As does probably 5G and successors. They don't replace last mile/last 10 mile wired Internet for all cases but we do increasingly have viable alternative for more rural locations.

My brother's house had a 1Mb/s down ADSL wired connection and he was the last house on the road that could get "broadband" at all. With Starlink, he's able to work, stream video, etc. which wouldn't have been possible before.

It’s also important to recognize companies like SpaceX benefit heavily from socialized infrastructure. For example, they lease a pad at Kennedy Space Center and use DoD infrastructure at Vandenberg.

While there's perhaps some excessive idolatry of SpaceX and shade on ULA and NASA initiatives, I'm not sure that subsidies--somewhat overt or otherwise--are necessarily a bad thing. Certainly DARPA has a long history.

I tend to agree. I think the hybrid system has a lot of benefits, but unfortunately many of these discussions seems to devolve into framing the issue as a false dichotomy.

Strictly speaking, that's doing something inefficient for the benefit of people living in rural areas, not society as a whole.

Sometimes the benefit comes in the form of a stable society. The idea that there is a clear a 1-to-1 transactional benefit is myopic.

Are you saying farmers would revolt if their internet was slow.

I’m saying society can only tolerate a certain amount of inequality.

Society can clearly tolerate huge amounts of inequality and has done in the past, far moreso than what we have today (kings vs peasants). Also see my comment above for my views on people who claim to speak for all of society.

I didn’t claim society can’t tolerate any inequality. The question is how much it can tolerate and remain stable. There’s an argument that feudal systems you mentioned are now longer the norm because that inequality led to alternate systems.

Regarding your first response, you may want to visit the HN guidelines regarding shallow dismissals.

Clearly it's a lot more than slow internet for farmers?

Feudal systems didn't end because of inequality, they were the opposite: the feudal system ended when serfs were allowed to enclose their communal land and were given it as private property. It went from an equal system that suffered a tragedy of the commons ("the commons" literally referring to the common land that existed under the feudal system), to a system of private farmers who were able to capture some of the wealth from their effort and land.

>Clearly it's a lot more than slow internet for farmers?

Again, I'm not sure if the intent of this is another shallow dismissal or if you're failing to make the connection I'm trying to communicate.

>the feudal system ended when serfs were allowed to enclose their communal land and were given it as private property.

Why do you think the nobility allowed this? History tells us it's rare that a consolidated power willingly gives up that power. Is it possible that the inequality of rights and taxation led to the nobility's hand being forced here?

The parent is correct.

Anyway you look at it, many historic societies existed for hundreds of years with levels of inequality vastly greater than experienced currently by any farmer in the U.S.

The parent can be correct and still miss the forest for the trees. Too much of of HN seems focused on being pedantically correct while missing the larger context.

You are using the current situation of a farmer (who has access to the internet and other regulated monopolies) as evidence for the case against those very services. If you remove that level of access, I don't think you have the point you think you do.

It's like pointing to someone who gets government assistance and saying "See? There isn't enough quality of life differential to warrant them getting assistance." The very fact that they receive assistance is exactly why that level of discrepancy is lower.

If you're saying that its possible that greater inequality can be tolerated, it's missing the point. I'm not stating a claim about an absolute level; I'm saying society should be aware that a tipping point exists. The same is said for taxation; people can point to past eras where people paid a higher effective tax rate and claim that as evidence that the current level should be raised. That doesn't negate the point that there is some rate that will make society relatively unstable.

> I'm saying society should be aware that a tipping point exists.

Why do you believe such a thing exists in the U.S.?

I personally find the arguments for mutually assured destruction very plausible.

Whether it's between countries or between factions within a country with WMDs, a real fighting war will practically wipe out the citizenry, including the vast majority of farmers and certainly everyone living in cities.

>Why do you believe such a thing exists in the U.S.?

Because it exists for every civilization and essentially every system. The U.S. is not inherently exceptional in this regard.

And, yes, MAD is plausible and also a strong deterrent. But a central crux of the theory is that the system is inhabited by rational agents. Humans can even be modeled as rational agents most of the time, but I don't believe they adhere to this model all of the time. Behavioral psychology seems to bear this out.

> Because it exists for every civilization and essentially every system. The U.S. is not inherently exceptional in this regard.

How does that follow? Clearly the presence of WMDs changed the game.

I also don't see how rationality, or it's absence, relates to this point?

Not knowing much about the REA, I doubt humanitarian arguments were behind it. I imagine it was successfully sold to Congress as a farm subsidy. Rural areas were where the farms were, and farms needed electricity.

My point was that helping some minority often does help society as a whole.

The ADA, strictly speaking, only helps those with disabilities. But guess what? Having people with disabilities be able to access goods, services, and work just like anyone else helps society as a whole.

I don't really expect a straight answer to this, because the sort of people who loftily declare what is best for society as a whole usually just get angry instead of answering, but how do you justify the claim that this helps society as a whole? The ADA helps the minority by making the lives of the majority worse (higher costs, taxes, more effort etc). Making that tradeoff might be a highly moral position and justifiable on that basis alone, but there's no way to justify it on the basis of helping society as a whole. Society isn't a single thing that can be said to be helped or hindered. It helps a few people by hindering the many. It'd be better to just admit that and then argue on moral grounds, like via reference to religion.

Not the OP, but I think part of the answer is that society benefits from ensuring a certain amount of baseline rights, privileges, and opportunities are open to all its citizens, even when it's inconvenient. It's not just a moral position, it also helps ensure one group doesn't consolidate power and resources.

For example, I would want to make sure you still have access to voting even if it costs a disproportionately high amount of money to ensure that right for you or if it's much more probable that you would vote against my personal selfish interest. We generally want a society with a shared set of core principles rather than just a purely transactional society.

The ADA also helps anyone who has kids and a stroller. Also helps people when they are injured and immobile for a time. Dealing with these things in other countries makes you appreciate the ADA so much more.

You’re right I’m not thinking of something super objective (I’m also not particularly interested in an objective measure of what’s good for society), but here are a few ways the ADA makes society better:

1. More people are able to contribute to society in ways they were unable to before. Personally, my life is better because I’ve learned from people of various abilities. That wouldn’t be possible if my school and workplaces were unable to accommodate them.

2. We all get older, we all lose abilities as we age. The ADA is helpful to literally every elderly person. Not to mention all able-bodied people are one accident away from requiring ADA amenities.

3. As other comments mentioned, some ADA regulations help more than just the disabled.

4. I don’t expect this to be a majority HN perspective, but I believe we’re only as free as the worst off in our society. Lifting the floor is always a good thing, in my opinion.

With that same argumentation, it can be argued that moving food from rural areas into cities is doing something for the benefit of people living in cities, not society as a whole.

Also, internet and such for rural people benefits society as a whole, indirectly. For example, better crop yields (Through better access to information) and such.

So, I think your argument is deeply flawed.

The difference is that food is paid for on the free market. Government infrastructure isn't.

But if you take a look at the massive amounts of subsidies (to both farmers and consumers), you realize food (in the US, at least) is not a “free market”. Same with fuel, etc.

> doing something inefficient for the benefit of society ... ADA

Having a disability isn't a choice. Living rurally is.

For the individual, maybe. At a societal level, at least some people are required to live in rural areas, so we can have the raw materials society requires.

The fact that disability isn't a choice means that disabled people can't become undisabled, and abled people probably shouldn't make a choice to become permanently disabled.

Because rural/urban living is a choice, this means people can come in and out in response to supply and demand via the price mechanism. If rural areas are viewed as undesirable, rural wages will rise until it justifies people being there.

As a rural tax payer I'm paying for some city dwellers to sit around all day doing nothing.

All the benefits you enjoy as a result of living in a modern society have been paid for by someone other than you.

It's vastly more economical to build infrastructure for a few million people spread over a metro rather than over a state and cities are centers of commerce and industry. Not only do cities more than pay for themselves universally they also pay for nonproductive rural areas which are very expensive to maintain and provided little revenue.

Basically unless you grow food the city folks would be economically better off if you didn't exist. Your world view is exactly the opposite of reality.

City dwellers also buy things manufactured in rural areas. Most of them expect a nationwide transportation network that isn't just interstate highways and gas stations. In addition to food, there is all the resource extraction that needs workers, who have families, and need healthcare etc. Basically a lot of people living in rural areas are either doing things that, in part, support people who live in more urban areas or they're supporting supporting those people.

Cities eat up tax dollars too. Boston's Big Dig was basically a $10 billion or so gift to Boston from, not only Western Massachusetts taxpayers but the rest of the country. (The Speaker of the House was from the Boston area.)

Some of that is right, but believe it or not farmers also need local services like health care workers, tradespeople, some semblance of government, etc.

All of what I said is right and all of what you said is right. The grandparent comment stated that.

> As a rural tax payer I'm paying for some city dwellers to sit around all day doing nothing. All the benefits you enjoy as a result of living in a modern society have been paid for by someone other than you.

No part of that is right. Economically rural areas are a drain justified only by farming, votes, and a charitable desire to serve our fellow man. The idea that a handful of farmers are somehow paying for the teeming masses in the city to sit on their hands is wrong on its face.

The comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, the point was that almost everything is paid for by someone else.

> Basically unless you grow food the city folks would be economically better off if you didn't exist.

"Basically, if we didn't need to eat, we'd be better off of our digestive system didn't exist."

What a hilariously strange world view. There are comparative advantages for both urban and rural areas, and both are vitally important.

Urban areas optimize for concentration of labor. Rural areas optimize for land-and-resource-dependent operations.

You won't build a successful large scale R&D lab in a small farm town, but you also won't build a successful mining operation in downtown LA.

(Also as an addendum, there are so many industries dependent on land and resources other than just agriculture).

If you want to be mercenary about it farms already require only a tiny fraction of the rural population to run and will in the future require even fewer. We need the land. Virtually all of the folks not so much.

This is absolutely true, and the required subsidies for those places with mass exoduses will presumably drop over time (though will like increase per remaining person for those few necessary remaining people).

Isn't farming (the thing that AFAIK keeps most rural places, well, rural) subsidized in the USA to the similar level that it is in EU?

Rural farm land and dense urban cities are equally important. We're all fundamentally interconnected.

I wonder how cities would support themselves without rural landmass? The benefit is two way, and a $20k price tag does not capture it all all.

Nobody wants to ban rural living, just stop subsidizing it, or subsidize it less. I don't get why responses to these suggestions are always framed this way: "but you need the countryside!" Well, yes... and that's what paying for goods and services is for.

If the situation were reversed, these kinds of defenses would not convince the people making them that rural dwellers ought to subsidize urban living.

Eh, we decided a while ago that certain things are worth subsidizing if they benefit the country as a whole.

Education, healthcare, transportation, retirement -- these are all things where we could say "People can just pay for these things if they value them", but instead we determined that some subsidies are good for the country as a whole (we often even want more subsidies for some of these).

Likewise, it's important to have a population that's willing to live and work in rural industries that supply big city centers. Subsidies to provide some of the infrastructure that more dense areas have can help the nation accomplish that needed population mix more easily.

So food prices skyrocket to make up for the lack of subsidies, and everyone gets a food purchase subsidy to make up for the high food prices since nobody wants people starving in the streets. Heck, Minnesota just became the fourth state to offer breakfast and lunch for free to all students regardless of ability to pay.

You can shuffle the board around however you want, but the truth is that agriculture (and therefor rural life) is going to be paid for one way or another.

So let food prices rise. This is a more honest method of accounting, because it is the people consuming the food who pay the cost of producing the food.

The status quo is that people indirectly pay for food through taxes, higher service cost, and other distortions that have no relation to how much food they consume. They are forced to pay a subsidy whether they like it or not.

Don't forget foreigners: If your country has a subsidized food production system and you're exporting food, then foreigners are benefiting from your subsidies. (This is actually a debate in Canada vs. USA regarding milk.)

>So let food prices rise.

"Let them eat cake"

This argument only makes sense if you're only subsidising consumption, but infrastructure increases the productive capacity of the economy as a whole, so the government gets a return on its subsidy in increased taxes.

If it costs an extra $20k to set up a new farm then we let food prices rise slightly to cover the costs. Why does the government have to step in?