| Thanks for your list. > Rural areas extract and produce many resources that urban areas depend on. Agriculture, fishing, oil, gas, uranium, wood, maple syrup, etc. Sure, and market prices reward them for that in relation to how useful that is. No reason for a subsidy. > You can’t get workforces to live in those places or businesses to operate there if there’s no roads, internet, mail, schools, hospitals, etc (or if those things are prohibitively expensive). Why do we want to workforces to live in rural areas? In any case, land prices will drop to establish equilibrium. That sucks for land owners, but the workforce doesn't care whether they get their benefits in forms of lower rent or explicit subsidies. > Don’t forget that subsidy doesn’t always mean the difference between whether it’s expensive or not, it can also mean the difference between having and not having. Singapore has plenty of rural areas lining up to export to her, without paying any subsidies (above market prices) to them. > Another reason is that too much regional wealth inequality can be bad for national stability. It can lead to things like civil wars and unrest. That's a good argument for breaking up nations into smaller units, sure. |