Rural Canada is where I'm located at the moment. I tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.
We lived without cities, but with a vastly lower population and quality of life. Things like knowledge work and financialization are what made possible great ventures such as energy distribution, transportation, mechanized farming, medicines, and so forth. I'm not sure agriculture would even sustain the existing rural population without the infrastructure of a complex modern economy.
We're all in this together.
But your reasoning makes no sense. You don't need subsidies to have food. Here's a study on farm subsidies that found that removing them would increase prices only slightly for most goods: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Fa...
> The impact of premium subsidies – which work as discounts on the amount that farmers pay for crop insurance - varies widely depending on the crop and the policy. The price of corn, which is primarily used for livestock feed, would rise by nearly 5 percent if the subsidy were withdrawn, which would hurt livestock operations as well as foreign customers and ethanol producers.
> Lusk says that removing subsidies would lead to at least small price increases for all foods, with the largest increase, of 1 percent, for eggs. Meat prices would be about 0.55 percent higher. Fruit and vegetable growers also benefit from the insurance, so prices for those crops would rise by 0.67 percent, Lusk found. The price of dairy products would be 0.14 percent higher.
To disprove that you need cities that are self-sufficient.
Subsidies don’t matter in that question.
Was what the whole thread started with.
So yeah, it was a straw man on your part.
This is why cities came about in the first place.
> that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.
It's not the case that all rural areas are subsidized in the way those in the US often are.