Due to agricultural monocultures and climate limitations, most rural areas are not self-sustaining either. A given rural locale may contribute certain products to cities, but it is also a net recipient of other products from elsewhere – and the logistics of getting all those products to the given rural locale may well have been managed within cities.
So? That doesn't make them any less necessary. If anything, it just reinforces how necessary they are, since different rural areas need to specialize in different raw materials and foodstuffs.
My comment wasn't a reply to why we should do away with cities, it was a reply to why rural areas should "be subsidized" (I'm assuming road construction here, and maybe social welfare for impoverished).
People in Urban and suburban areas are perfectly aware their food come from mostly rural areas.
Almost everything else in your home; your car; the technology they depend on; the road, telecom, hospital, etc infrastructure and the technology they depend on come almost entirely from cities and suburbs.
HN? The device you use to access it? Almost all the tech news on it? The network infrastructure you use to lower its comment quality? The language its written? The computers it runs on? Not from rural areas.
You don’t have to subsidize me, bud. I paid my own money to get a well, get electricity service, no paved roads for miles. I actually can’t think of a government service I didn’t pay for!
Of course you don't. That doesn't mean they don't exist but it is certainly believable that they are conveniently--so conveniently--outside your mental orbit.
Who subsidized your electrical company's build-out of the long-haul transmission lines to get electricity out to you? Do the payers of those subsidies see an ROI from long-haul transmission lines to economically minimal areas?
Ditto telco?
Where do you buy groceries? Who disproportionately paid for all of the utilities and transportation necessary to make that work?
How about delivery? Mail is hugely subsidized, particularly for rural routes, and commercial carriers use all those roads-'n-stuff to get to you. Your last mile, or even last miles, might be dirt--y'all certainly aren't paying proportionally for the highways to get even close enough.
I grew up in rural areas. Lots of people sneered a lot about The Gubmint. And even in that weird epistemic closure not a one paid out what they took. Which is fine; that's how it's supposed to work, and there's an argument for some subsidy of rural living for a number of both moral and practical reasons. But leaving the disingenuity in the closet where it belongs and showing some basic respect for the process that allows it is at least polite.