People choose to live outside cities, but want access to basic utilities of modern life? Well, fuck 'em.
There are many small towns who will never generate the tax revenue to cover their $50M highway off-ramp and associated infrastructure. The thread was about internet, which has also been subsidized. We subside oil so driving long distances is cheaper. We subsidize food production. Electricity and water distribution is subsidized by urban customers. Even health care is subsidized.
If rural people actually had to pay market-rate for these resources, it wouldn't be cheaper than the city.
What would drop in price exactly?
Electricity would be cheaper. Here in California, a significant amount of the (very high) electricity costs are used to maintain rural power lines. If rural people moved away, we'd be able to decommission them and no longer maintain the lines.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but as more people become urbanites, we'd be able to move gas subsidies and government road maintenance spending to the urban environment, where we'd spend on more drivers-per-mile roads, OR shift to public transit funding, or simply reduce that government spending.
Over time, we'd be less reliant on cars, which reduces everyones costs, but will mean we aren't so desperate to protect oil interests, so we'd be able to stop paying for wars in the middle-east. Honestly this alone has so many positive side-affects it'd be hard to actually enumerate.
These things usually happen far outside of the cities. Without infrastructure for the countryside these things would not happen.
Small towns are or can be made to be efficient in terms of basic infrastructure/services, whereas truly rural areas where everyone is very spread out, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do that.
