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Comment by hattmall | Hacker News Reader

I think that's a very idealistic idea. The reality is that some people / land area are simply far more important than others. It's not to say that the individual themselves is more meaningful as a matter of state, but there positioning, role in society etc simply carries more raw value than others.

The US is huge and you have a major divide from the producers and the benefiters, the most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers. Mainly your food production, natural resource extraction, and logistical operations are what allows the entire rest of the country to function.

You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.

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I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers, but even if you accept that premise, it is immediately undermined by California.

California is an both a service economy and agricultural powerhouse, the number one producer of agricultural value in the US by far. Other states with heavily urbanized populations like like Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin all produce a ton of agricultural value.

Are you saying that California deserves more representation for having a lot of farms then?

Not to mention as agriculture and resource extraction industrialized and has automated, its required a smaller percentage of the labor force than ever before.

So why should the industrial base of a state have anything to do with how well citizens are represented?

>I disagree with your premise that agricultural and extraction workers have some higher intrinsic value compared to urban dwellers

Ok, which would you rather forgo for a month / a year / a lifetime? The output of a city, or the food and energy outputs of the rural areas.

I don't see how California is undermining anything. California has a lot of both rural and urban areas like many states, that doesn't change the premise and California is known for bending over backwards and taking a lot of detrimental actions to support their agricultural industry.

> most critical components of the US don't require large populations centers

Yes, but large cities still produce the most value if we're talking in economic terms. For food production especially. Most logistical operation also operates in large cities.

>You absolutely have to offer some level of appeasement that outsizes their population representation to the people who support everyone else.

Well, yes. That was the big comprmise made by the constitution to begin with. They needed something like a Senate to get smaller states to sign on.

But we aren't talking in economic terms. We are talking in political terms. The economy is an offshoot of the functioning political system. Contextually they are different things although logically intertwined, but resources and their management / allocation is what gives rise to the idea of governance and that governance implements the economic system etc. Without the resources there isn't really anything to govern. The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.

And I mean, obviously the current situation is not this way because we have a very functioning system, most rural people don't even use the food and resources that are extracted around them anyway as we import and move things around at an unprecedented scale. But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level. You literally can not support the cities without the rural output, even if the larger value, monetarily, is created in the urban area.

I use economics because I don't know how to politically measure "success". As it is now, what a politician wants is clearly divorced from what their constituents want.

>The infrastructure and logistics in a city are generally geared toward supporting that city, not the rural areas.

But thse large states also help fund small states. Which small states are considered "donor states".

> But we are talking about what is important to a functioning large scale country and economy at the basic level.

California is the 4th largest world economy. It can certainly break off and operate fine by itself if things got truly dire. The main thing missing is a standing army and nukes. The latter of which is probably the main bargaining chip of the smaller states at this point.

I think you underestimate how efficient the larger states can be. And overestimate the economic value of the smaller ones under the stereotype that "they produce the most food". They produce a lot, but not the most.

But per-worker productivity is higher in larger states - so there goes that maker vs. taker justification of up-weighting rural areas. Regardless, plenty of other countries continue to produce adequate amounts of food despite a much more central approach.

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