Is there some benefit to greater America from their existence?
Edit: apparently people are interpreting my comment negatively. I was seriously asking if these small town communities can act as a sort of buffer during recessions because of their relative isolation, thereby limiting negative effects. I'm not questioning whether they should exist or anything nonsensical like that.
It goes both ways though, because they're small towns, they can have their own recessions that have little to do with national recessions. When a factory is shuttered, it can have devastating affects for a small town, much worse than a typical recession, but nobody outside that community would notice much.
This has been happening all over the rural US for the past 20 years. Everyone talks about the past 8 years of stock market booms, and low unemployment but there are a lot of small towns all over the US that are getting crushed by globalization. Nobody talks about because the problems are local to those towns, but for those that live there, the problems are very real and dire.
What an absolutely inhuman comment this is.
Its everyone else fault that nobody wanted to buy the crap their local industries made?
Are you asking if there's a good reason why these small towns should exist?
Say, there are benefits for the whole nation (and the whole humankind) from maintaining and supporting national parks and national monuments, even if they don't and can't turn a profit.
Or, there are various considerations leading to support for local farming, even if it would not make business sense without donations.
Are small towns equally important, and require some degree of support, or should they naturally close shop and disappear sometimes, when they stop making sense, the way businesses do?
This is the key question. No one wants to up and remove those towns. The question is: should we subsidize their existence beyond the infrastructure like road, mail, etc... that we already pay for? And if we want to do that, how do we go about it to get the most bang for our buck?
By and large, rural America is subsidized by the rest of America, be they urbanites or large companies. And to be frank, that's fine; I support generally allowing people to find the best way for them to live, within reason. (Where people like me start getting snippy--and we do, we aren't saints--is when that's not acknowledged. "Real Americans" and the like.)
But the city environment undeniably makes many people less happy. Studies have shown a link between urban living and mental illness.
So it might be nice to maintain options for humans who thrive in a more rural environment.
Do you have a link for these claims? Genuinely curious, I've always wondered about this.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5374256/
I'm not an expert at knowing what studies are good... so someone will probably comment about why this study is problematic, and that's ok.
"Studies have shown that the risk for serious mental illness is generally higher in cities compared to rural areas. Epidemiological studies have associated growing up and living in cities with a considerably higher risk for schizophrenia. However, correlation is not causation and living in poverty can both contribute to and result from impairments associated with poor mental health. Social isolation and discrimination as well as poverty in the neighborhood contribute to the mental health burden while little is known about specific interactions between such factors and the built environment."
Our political problems stem from each group having little empathy for other groups. Empathy == deep understanding without judgement. The thing that put an erratic man-child in the Whitehouse is half the population having utter disdain instead of empathy for the other half, resulting in a highly predictable reaction.
I have deep empathy for people living in areas where there economic futures and opportunities are consistently getting worse.
We can either find a way a fix that, so that it is possible to continue to live in rural areas AND have employment opportunities.... OR everyone will end up living in cities regardless.
Much of our political differences come from one group being on an upward financial trajectory and the other group being on a downward trajectory. If our outlooks for the future were aligned of course we would have less differences in regards to political policies on taxation, immigration, the environment or issues like government spending on scientific research.