The point I tried--and failed!--to make is that in general the recipients of these subsidies have very simplistic and one-sided views of them (if they even see them as subsidies).

I'll pick on this statement of yours:

> But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities.

...it's not wrong, but it's incomplete: you forget as well that for modern farming, you also need all/most/some of those roads to get tractors/fertilizer/pesticide to those farms so they can actually have surplus food to bring to the city to sell (and presumably the farmers would like clothes, housewares, televisions, and so on...).

Sure, at an aggregate level the numbers wind up the same--you save some on roads but fresh produce has a higher sticker price--but it's grating that the recipients of said subsidy consistently take such a one-sided view of the implicit transaction.

Sticking to just the roads, it's also very partial-equilibrium: stop funding those roads (e.g. so they devolve to dirt or gravel) and what happens to the cost-effectiveness of those electrical coops? Maintenance and repair gets pricier b/c it becomes harder to get where you need to get...and depending on how crappy we're letting our roads get in this thought experiment we're maybe having a much harder time getting the generating and related equipment to where it needs to be in the first place.

Moving on a bit, when you dig into things like that universal service fund it's IMHO a mistake to take it at face value.

The first issue is assuming the surcharge is the only form of subsidization; this isn't generally true. It's quite common for e.g. telecom utilities to charge roughly uniform rates over surprisingly wide geographic areas, with surprisingly wide operating costs "under the hood". There are a lot of reasons behind this pricing uniformity, but regardless of why it exists it's effectively a second layer of (hidden) subsidization (b/c the residents of lower-cost-of-service areas are effectively contributing funding to the residents in higher-cost-of-service). There are enough reasons for this uniformity it's hard to imagine it disappearing...but it's still important to be aware of b/c otherwise you assume that that subsidy is sufficient to cover the true cost-of-service differential.

A second issue is mis-understanding the incidence. Let's use pretend #s to make it easy: everyone's bill looks like $localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge (so the subsidy is collected from everyone and then redistributed as-needed). We'll use that $7 billion / year figure as the total subsidy collected, and as a nice round # assume 350 million people paying, so basically everyone in the country's throwing a $20 into a big pot to keep everyone else's phones working.

So far so good. But now let's kill the subsidy, what happens? First, everyone's bill goes from "$localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge" to just "$localBase", since now we're no longer kicking in that $20.

Keeping all assumptions simplistic, we will go with 60% of the country (just under that 2/3 living near the borders) were already paying full-freight on their base rate, and thus they're now $20 richer with no direct ill-effects.

The remaining 40%, however, were paying a base rate that fell $7 billion short of what it needed to be--whence the subsidy we just threw out--and thus now it's up to ~140 million people to scrounge up that $7 billion shortfall. This isn't the end of the world--they're just going from "$localBase + $20" to "$localBase + $50 (== $realLocalBase)"--but it'd a big increase (their original contribution, that much again, and then a bit more).

In this case I had to slant the #s pretty aggressively and for this specific subsidy the reality of the situation is more modest...but I worked through it b/c it illustrates the fundamental logic of such subsidies: you have a lot of people paying a little bit to save a smaller group of people from a large expense.

Such arrangements are not, IMHO, intrinsically questionable...but it's definitely a bit questionable to conflate aggregate costs ($7 billion, cheap!) with the implicit per-capita benefit received (with my BS #s it's a net $30/head for the recipients).

Having said all this I feel the need to point out that farmers proper are usually much more realistic; it's more the farming-adjacent (e.g. those who live in "rural" areas) who tend to think of roads as (literally) one way "food to town" transports and so on.