[edmundsauto]

It sounds like you're suggesting the subsidies remain, but the red states get to pretend that it's not the anti-government individualism their personal ideologies demand?

If people want self-dependence and self-determination, they should strive for it - not play acting that they are independent. What they should not do is complain about the entire concept of government intervention ("socialism!") while benefitting from the exact same thing, paid for disproportionately by the groups they demonize.

[mindslight]

I'm talking straight up pragmatic realpolitik. Fundamentalism is attractive to people in poverty, because it lends a purposeful narrative to their suffering. Fundamentalism then breeds more poverty. If we don't want that cycle to take down the country with ever more regressive fundamentalism, then we need to break it. If that involves pinching our nose and tiptoeing around the hypocrisy, then so be it.

From my libertarian perspective I'd rather not use a loaded term like "subsidy" due to the larger context where the government printed massive amounts of money over the past several decades, benefitting the centralizing/urban metagamers at the expense of the distributed/rural economy. Loaded terms make it too easy to condemn specific aspects while ignoring others that are quite similar.