Agree or disagree?

While big cities are obviously engines of economic growth, they also have a tendency to encourage unhealthy dependence on politicians. Because everywhere you look, there’s signs of government! Politics is viewed as a career; corruption is just accepted as inevitable. Learning to navigate the political system becomes a more valuable life skill than building a business that provides a reliable product at a price customers are willing to pay. This results in a social dynamic where people in urban areas first look to politicians to solve their problems...rather than relying on themselves.

That’s not true in rural America.

It’s very difficult to grow up in a rural area (or even just a small-ish town) and think that politicians are more important than small business owners, pastors, farmers, plumbers, teachers, agricultural workers, and all of the other professions that make a community what it is. I’m not sure what the causal factor is, but it’s undeniable that living in a small town makes you more skeptical of government. Living in a larger city makes you dependent on it in more ways than you realize.

As Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to James Madison, “I think our government will remain virtuous as long as the people are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”