Hacker News Reader

Comment by ducktales | Hacker News Reader

I ask the following to hopefully promote discussion, I don't necessarily espouse the opinion.

With most of the US critically thinking about the electoral / senatorial systems, and how the scales do tip towards rural states..

What concessions, if any, should rural states / areas be entitled to, given that they are the food producers for our country? On paper, that could provide leverage / a "bargaining chip" in this discussion.

The flip-side to this coin is that the more urban states / areas are the economic drivers of the country, which is clearly a source of leverage as well.

I feel like most people don't think about it in these terms, and I'm curious how it would impact their opinions when adding the dimension of leverage / "social value" to population.

Perhaps these should have no weight on a discussion of representation?

View on HN

None. One person. One vote. Rural America wouldn’t survive without farm subsidies and protectionist trade policies. If they had to sell at cost without subsidies, it would be cheaper to import food. How much are farm subsidies just for corn?

If you have to import food to feed your people, you are not an independent nation. You are a vassal state of whoever is feeding you. That's why countries protect their agricultural sector. It's why when you cross over into Canada from the US, the landscape quickly changes to agricultural as what's often considered marginal to poor farmland in the US is considered prime ag land in Canada since they want to grow as much of their own food as possible. Agriculture is what makes civilization possible, not the other way around. Farmers can exist just fine if cities disappeared. Cities cannot say the inverse.

How well will farmers survive without the infrastructure that is provided by modern cities? Hospitals? The years when they have poor yields?

How is the quality of life of more agrarian societies compared to more industrial nations?

When a worldwide pandemic happens, how is rural America going to do? How are poorer more agrarian countries now doing in the midst of Covid compared to the industries countries?

Of course farmers would be worse off without cities. But cities would have simply ceased to exist all together without farmers.

Coastal cities can import food…

That implies that you still need farmers and you just outsourced them.

But we don’t subsidize them.

If I can’t find a job in my state based on my skillset, I can move to anywhere in the US. Heck, my company is on the opposite coast and I WFH. Knowledge workers have a lot more mobility and much less capital tied up in their labor.

In other words, if my state went to shit because CA is not subsidizing it, it wouldn’t affect me.

The country from where you'll be buying food from will and you can be sure you'll be paying for it.

>It's why when you cross over into Canada from the US, the landscape quickly changes to agricultural as what's often considered marginal to poor farmland in the US is considered prime ag land in Canada since they want to grow as much of their own food as possible.

Source? I inspected various parts of the canada-us border using google maps and can't find an example of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com