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).