Maggie's Farm

This is part of the great divide in America: it isn't by class or economics, it is geographical.

In cities there is a movement towards large scale, localized structures to serve the entire population of that city. Roads, water supplies, sewage, communications... all of that is compacted due to urban environment. That environment brings large results to minor changes: add aqueducts and cities go from mere tens of thousands to millions in size. Ditto sewage systems, which were invented before the late Bronze Age and lost, only to be re-invented by necessity. Both of these have dramatic impacts to public health by keeping fresh water flowing in and sewage flowing out. Until London got a modern sewage system in the 19th century, it was always getting plagues of typhus and cholera due to contaminated water supplies.

What works great for a dense accumulation of people doesn't work at larger geographic areas. We do make huge municipal water systems due to the scale of nearby cities and now even small towns have same, but the cost per person investment is far higher for lower output and higher processing costs. Ditto with sewage systems. In rural areas when I was growing up 'city water' was a luxury and a county project, not a city or town one. At that point the cost per person is higher due to distances of water travel and use of water and sewage capability (and I do remember the septic tank and leech field in my youth without county sewage).

Health care is great for cities, a hospital can serve a dense amount of humanity within walking distance or a few miles drive. In a low density population county that could be a half hour or more to a similar facility. It is necessary but is only made possible with modern transport.

Civic support systems, however, are stronger in rural areas and small towns which gather together like-minded people who enjoy their surroundings and each other. Becoming a functioning part of a small town is a multi-year or even generational affair as it is a community with history that is remembered. In cities and especially suburbs, that evaporates into transient populations. You stay in a city to use cultural institutions, you live in a small town to create them and sustain them personally.

Not only do the scale differences in life change the economic outlook, but the social one, as well. This goes back before the Founding and nearly broke the Nation under the Articles of Confederation as the northeast States were dominated by cities at the expense of the rural communities. The Shaysites appeared because of that and the oppressive behavior of city denizens towards those in the countryside. That was very much what people who fought in the Revolution were against, and the uprisings were getting to the point in 1785-86 that one successful rebellion in the northeast would start the process of tumbling down the new Nation.

The Constitution was supposed to help that, and did, by and large, yet the Anti-Federalists pointed to weaknesses in the structure of the system and that it did not have powerful enough checks and balances... which was a strong federalist argument put forward by a few writers against the Constitution. The worry of concentration of power was a strong one, as the preceding years had shown and it was unknown if the Constitution would last. It did, but the differences in outlook in society that now washes up to interstate bypasses is coming to the forefront, again.

Geography very much determines your view on collective need and individual support of social structure, and if you live on one side of a bypass you see the world one way, and on the other side it goes the other way. And when those who move from cities to small towns to retire bring their big city views and spending ideas, along with taxation, they find that no matter the size of their cohort, their solutions do not scale down well or at all. California, New York, Michigan and a few other states have exported their views to Florida, Arizona, the Carolinas, and elsewhere and are finding that they are bankrupting states unable to gain benefits to large scale social structures that work so-so to middling in cities and are expensive in non-city environments. These two views of personal responsibility to society have come to loggerheads before and nearly broke the Nation.

We are one fine Shays away from that day again.