Comment by tstrimple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tstrimple | Hacker News Reader

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You're discounting how much more of it there is. Living in Iowa, it's clear that rural areas cannot maintain their roads or bridges. By some measures, Iowa has the most structurally deficient bridges in the nation, with 90% of those bridges being in rural areas. Half of the bridges that are structurally deficient see an average of 35 cars across them per day. Iowa has around 14k miles of primary roads, and around 100k miles of gravel and dirt roads. Roughly 1/3rd of Iowa's population is rural at 1.1M people. Generally speaking, gravel roads cost more to maintain than paved roads because they need maintenance so much more often. Heavy rains and floods aren't uncommon out here, and they can be devastating to gravel infrastructure.

So you've got the rural 1/3rd of the population depending on 7x more roads and 20x more bridges than the urban population. If those folks actually bore the full cost of maintaining their own roads, I'd be willing to bet many of them would decide their rural lifestyle wasn't worth quite as much as they claimed.

You are arguing that it would be cheaper to pave every inch of remote god-forsaken farm backroads? Heavy rains and floods also do extensive damage to paved roads that can't be fixed by pushing some dirt around with a bulldozer. BTW, those bridges that service 35 vehicles oftentimes keep the more densely populated areas fed

> BTW, those bridges that service 35 vehicles oftentimes keep the more densely populated areas fed

I assume if it's vital infrastructure to a couple mega-farms they'll happily take over maintenance. They're not gonna just shut down operations because some rural bridges on their preferred routes aren't maintained anymore. They'll either accept longer routes using a smaller set of still-publicly-maintained bridges, or solve the problem some other way, maybe by maintaining the roads themselves. Public spending drops, and one or both of food prices go up slightly and profits go down slightly. Seems fine. May well be cheaper, overall—forcing companies to choose between longer routes and maintaining their own roads seems like a good way to weed out routes that are being maintained at a net loss.

Why do folks act like farmers are doing what they do out of altruism or something? "You owe farmers! They feed you!" Yeah, I do owe them. I owe them what I paid for the food. Right? If they decide I'm not sufficiently grateful they can stop. I'm not a "the market solves all problems" sort but I'm pretty sure it'd solve that one, no problem. Others will happily increase production to make up for the loss, because it's a market. Throw a fit that urbanites aren't subsidizing rural living & businesses enough, and stop producing, and someone with more sense will gladly take that market share.

I agree with your view in general, but there is a reason why the agricultural business is heavily, heavily subsidized. Largely for national food security reasons.

If that wasn't the case, I am not sure the US would be a competitive position to grow staples compared with much of the rest of the world, which in itself is a whole topic of discussion.

Given that it already is being subsidized, I think thought needs to be done for handling the topic of broad agricultural good distribution and subsidies. Frankly I think corn, bioethanol, meat etc... should lose their subsidies but that in itself would be quite a vote loser.

E.G. How about canals, barges, railways instead of roadways

Yes, national security is a good reason to subsidize food production. I might agree with keeping all those bridges open, on those grounds—though I suspect overall economic efficiency could be improved by removing some fraction of them, without harming rates of food production, and that there's effectively some level of unproductive free-riding going on.

I just object to framing things like urbanites must subsidize rural living because "that's where their food comes from". Sure, of course... but that's why there's a food market. We're not propitiating the farm-gods to shower food upon us, but, instead, paying for food. Subsidies might make sense for several other reasons, but, as someone who spend much of his childhood in the country and sometimes living on small farms, the defensive "but you owe us" attitudes from some people when this topic comes up seem downright bizarre.

I think it would be great if that subsidization came in the form a universal FoodStamps only spendable on nationally produced strategic goods.

This would make subsidization more transparent to the general public, while also enabling free-market competition and innovation rather than free-money stagnation.

I think a lot of people miss the entire point of food subsidies. Like you said, it is about food security. But that is a bit of an abstract concept to a lot of people, a better way to phrase and view it, food subsidies are an alternative to massive granaries storing 1-2 years of an entire nation's food supply. Since food yields naturally vary up to 30% either way, and natural disasters and bad weather can wipe out entire states worth of food, you either need to store all that food as a back up in granaries (which has its own problems), or we can guarantee an overproduction of food so that way if Iowa gets flattened by hail we don't end up with food shortages.

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