Then the government can pay the people in rural areas enough cash to fly in food, or enough to pay for prices high enough to make it worthwhile to open a grocery store.
Costs should be as transparent as possible. If there is low supply and high demand, you can increase supply by moving the prices up.
Alternatively, people in rural areas have to charge far more money for what they sell.
Everything you say sounds good in theory, until you spend a bit of time studying the history of economic policies. It's...really fucking complicated, which is why nobody really knows what they're doing (I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash?). But what you're proposing is the sort of thing that works with a small group of people, but then as you scale more and more you realize there are so many complicating factors you never thoughts of - not just resources but political alliances! Oftentimes there are military reasons for these justifications. One of the reasons high-fructose corn syrup is subsidized in the United States is so the US would not be dependent upon Cuba for its sugar supply back when Cuba was a communist country. One of the main motivations of the international freeway system is emergency runways for military planes. And while many subsidies are controversial, such as corn and soy, nobody can deny that we have all the corn and soy we need and it's all affordable - which was always the goal.
The truth about subsidies is simple: they're too fucking complicated to make meaningful generalizations. Each case really is unique enough it needs its own context, analysis, and decision for what's best.
I agree with your sentiment, but I encourage you to really dive into the details of any economic subsidy and realize how many confounding factors there are. There's the old economics joke "it works in practice, but not in theory" for a reason.
> I mean how many people can predict when the stock market will crash?
I agree with the spirit of the post - subsidies should be implemented for non-economic reasons and are therefore justified with arguments that say there are other good reasons to pay the price.
But this specific example isn't the best example because the stock market is a competitive human-driven environment where if a signal is predictive people will make money off it until it stops being predictive.
That is quite different from real-world processes where the laws of physics tend to remain in effect no matter how many what people figure out. Eg, resource depletion behaves differently to the loss of signal in a stock market.
Fair point, I could've chosen a better example. I was trying to point out an obvious shortcoming of economists anyone could understand, rather than keep the example in line with the rest of the comment.
Costs should be as transparent as possible. If there is low supply and high demand, you can increase supply by moving the prices up.
Alternatively, people in rural areas have to charge far more money for what they sell.