What cures the economic ills of "Flyover Country"/Middle/Rural America?

[haele]

13. There isn't much to cure rural economic ills. There's no plan for options to Mayberry.

They're going to have to develop a new model, probably based on a mix of universal income and single payer health-care, along with a dedicated program that provides niche business development with a focus on agriculture, small/local manufacturing, and skilled crafts. There will also need to be a permanent investment in local infrastructure, including medical care; probably some sort of apprenticeship program where the government pays for expensive schooling in medical, law, environmental sciences, and teaching with a requirement for 4 - 6 year service obligation in a rural district.


The fact of the matter that politicians don't want to talk about is that there are very few larger employers that can be enticed into rural areas that can employ a significant number of working-aged able bodied adults to be able to make up for even half the losses of jobs in agriculture, resource extraction, or manufacturing over the past 50 years simply based on advancements in technology. Americans just have to understand that there will never again be the numbers of people required to do farming and manufacturing anymore - 150 acres of orchard or fields only need 5 people to plant or bring in a harvest on time instead of 30. Ranchers have RFID and GPS; two hands can do the job it took a dozen 40 years ago.
Factories that used to employ 2000 employees now only need 300; all the administration and logistics that used to require 50 to 100 clerks and secretaries are now handled by two admin assistants and a local network, and 2 - 6 workers can be dropped depending on how many stations were replaced and how many shifts the factory ran by just one robot and the one or two technicians hired to maintain it - and other robots.

However, a plan that addresses people who can't or don't want to move from rural areas where there are no jobs is pretty much nowhere in sight. No one want to talk about the problem; the assumption of rural inhabitants is that the politicians will just tell them to move from the dying towns if they can't make it, leaving the land open to corporate developers and forcing everyone who can't be of use to a corporation to live crammed into third world suburbs fighting for city-based service jobs with the urban and suburban inhabitants.
Basically, everyone knows that the frontier is gone; the outside world is everywhere and affects everyone. But no one wants to talk about what the options are for "Mayberry", if Mayberry is going to survive.
There needs to be an honest discussion both about the limits of living in the city and how to serve people who don't want to live in cities or suburbs, who thrive on the rural life, who can't handle being around a lot of people.
Just because one person has no problem with pushing paper and can make a career of networking, chasing clients and spending a lot of time sitting behind a desk doesn't mean everyone can live that life with dying a little inside every day. Some people thrive on chaos, some people require rigid order or they freak out; likewise some people love being in a crowd, and others need open spaces and a lot of time to think - and the majority of people fall in spectrums in between. We as a species need rural areas as well as being part of the herd.
So how do we as a country handle those who are better suited for rural life than they are urban life - without just writing them off as unprofitable lost causes? Despite what most corporate CEOs and other bean-counter types seem to think, people aren't fungible, and they certainly aren't disposable.
You can't just tell someone to "move to the city if you want a job" when they aren't capable of functioning anywhere else than where they are now.
So what are the options to Mayberry for the fly-overs?

Haele