I didn't miss that at all. To wit: "I personally don't think there's anything wrong or humiliating or condescending about being the benefactors of social welfare. I consider it the moral thing to do for people who need it in a society where we value everyone."
I recognize that everyone's needed. You're currently talking about people in rural communities that mine or farm, but it can easily be applied to people at the bottom of the economic food chain in urban areas, the people working two or three below-living-wage jobs. That was my point there.
Why shouldn't they have greater power when they have more people? To take this to extremes, do you think a town of 10 people should have equal power and representation to a city with 10 million people? To believe this, you'd have to believe that each person in that 10 person town is 10 million times more important than each person in the city.
And, if you do believe that, you're in luck--our terrible electoral system largely agrees with you and apportions power by land mass, not people. This isn't a democracy representative of people, it's a democracy representative of acreage.
I think you've gone too far over your skis on this point. You're absolutely correct when you say both rural communities and urban communities need each other--you immediately lose the plot when you outright state that it's an injustice that communities of more people have greater representation than communities of less people. That's exactly how a representative democracy is supposed to work. We need protections for minority communities, whether those are racial minorities or minorities like rural communities, but otherwise majorities do get greater power to determine policy. If that's unjust to you, representative democracy is not for you.
We're not headed there, we've been there for at least 20 years, probably longer.
