From a reader:

Jonah, It’s very tempting to tell you to stay in the shallow end of the pool on this one. Of course, everything you say in this article is unassailably correct. Having admitted that, I gotta tell you that you’ve committed garden variety flyover punditry. You rightly declare all of this a moral abomination. Got it. No argument. However, I know you’ve spent lots of time (lots and lots of time!) writing the magnum opus of the history of collectivist political movements. You know then, that welfare state policies have profound human consequences. The effect of ag subsidies in the US are immense and powerful and largely ignored. One reason you find flyover country so unpopulated, is that it’s been de-populated. Absentee ownership of land has been rapidly increasing for decades as a result of these subsidies. Land values are skyrocketing while the value of its productive capacity falls. Small towns throughout the west, Midwest & southwest are disappearing, schools are closing, and rural property is quickly becoming either gentrified in the case of unarable rangelands or ceded to remote corporate ownership in the case of farmland. Those who do remain are lingering mourners, and caretakers. The heartland has been ghettoized. I suppose the thing you missed, the thing you can’t know, is the terrible sadness of this. Go easy on this thing about those “salt of the earth” people pulling their own weight. Very likely, they’ll be gone soon enough.

Me: There are some points here. And I do feel sympathy and nostalgia for a disappearing way of life. But that nostalgia is being exploited by large corporations and politicians to protect giant wealth transfers to big business. That’s indefensible and deserves mockery.