The obvious counter to that is: without flyover country, the cities would all starve to death (rapidly) and would not have had the energy necessary to have been built in the first place. To say nothing of that the population foundations of most US cities were seeded thanks to people moving from more rural, agricultural-heavy regions. Labor imported from the more rural areas directly helped to build the cities over time (and that process of rural to urban continues today, albeit slower).
It has been a fair exchange in fact.
