Rural America is in trouble—on this, nearly everyone agrees. It's shrinking and aging, as college-educated young people leave small, isolated towns for new opportunities. The post-recession recovery in rural areas has lagged behind that of urban centers. But if there is consensus on the problem, solutions are a different matter. From re-training coal miners to funding broadband internet, ideas proliferate and receive piecemeal funding as politicians deem it necessary to earn rural votes. Others, however, have given up. Maybe there's nothing worth doing, the argument goes; maybe it's time to let rural America die a natural death.
At Reason, Nick Gillespie declared that bringing broadband to rural America was futile. “The bad news is that all the broadband in the world isn't going to transform rural America into God's Little Acre any more than a massively subsidized high-speed broadband boondoggle has turned Chattanooga in Blackburn's Tennessee into a bustling hub of activity (the city's population growth since 2000 is actually lower than the state's rate of 15 percent),” he argued. There's some truth here: Broadband alone can't save rural communities. But Gillespie isn't interested in saving them at all. “The answer to people being ‘left behind' isn't to bring the future to them (especially through tax dollars, which farmers and rural states soak up at massive rates). It's to make it easier for them to move,” he concluded.
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