We take a yearly vacation for our anniversary to the more wild area of our state and when I was driving, there were a few thoughts that came up. They're pretty obvious but I don't know who else to talk about them with.
The first one was the quality of the roads. I'm sure most Americans experience this a lot. You can tell when you enter a new county because right at the county line, the quality of the road changes. Any serious country would have some sort of nationwide standard and you wouldn't notice because the roads would all be nice. I understand that even under communism there will still be pot holes occasionally. Some areas have weather and other environmental factors that wear out the roads faster. Some roads get a lot more traffic etc. without getting into the semi vs train debate, there is also the fact that some companies just use the roads "harder" yet don't pay more into the upkeep funds. Taxing gas to fix roads just isn't enough. Also, the lane sizes differ. How isn't there a standard for that as well? Our car kept beeping at us saying I was crossing the painted line because the roads were super narrow in some places
A similar issue is cell phone coverage. Any serious country would have cell towers as a public utility instead of us having to run the risk of going to an area that has towers, but they don't work with your phone because you chose the wrong service.
Capitalism hasn't even cynically solved it by beating out other competition with actual good service. They have no incentive to.
In short, the illusion of choice sucks and the federal government should equitably distribute the road maintenance funds.
I don't know, just "thinking out loud" I guess
the geography / natural resources angle is one that opened my eyes to a basic truth obscured by the logic of "rich areas" and "poor areas". similar to a big city's wealthy districts and it's slums, the rich places are dependent on the poor places. some of the poorest places in the US have provided the natural resources and labor required to extract and build / concentrate the enormous wealth of our world class cities.
by underdeveloping these places and orienting them to extraction only, their resources are taken more cheaply. in this way, much of the wealth of the world class city is ill gotten and a product of its political power to mediate exchange.
a really good book that is probably too exhaustive (took me months to get through) is a geographic/environmental history of Chicago called "Nature's Metropolis" by William Cronon. it was a finalist for a Pulitzer.
I'm sort of a "history comes alive" type of weirdo, so I love shit like that. but it changed the way I think about things pretty significantly.
That sounds a lot like where I live. I wanted a home in the woods and I got it, but we don't make a ton of money so we bought in a place that is heavily trump country and a lot of the industry is tree cutting. I've watched over the last 6 years how they have been exploiting the forests on my commute to build slapdash housing and more hotels and weed stores for the tourist town nearby. Every little town around here shots on the one next door like you described. The resort town looks down on the five or six towns surrounding. I live in one of those and "we" (not me) shit on the one down the road. There's virtually no difference between my little town and the one we pick on.