Sure, but we explicitly tried to counter those forces in the US, including through government policy to build industry in areas where it wasn't before.
Moving the defense industry to be less-concentrated in Los Angeles was deliberate and wasn't moving to "frontier" towns. It was moving to towns that were created for one purpose but had been somewhat "skipped over" after that in favor of the biggest cities.
I think it's probably worth trying to incentivize that more today. It still happens organically some (big companies moving HQs out of expensive areas, for instance), but probably could stand to happen more.
I'm a big fan of the German style of federalization, where federal agencies are spread out around the nation, instead of all being headquartered in one federal capital. The Ministry of Defence is headquartered in Bonn; the BfV in Cologne; the Bundespolizei in Potsdam.
There's no reason why we can't do the same in the US, and have the USDA be headquartered in Kansas City, the Treasury in New York, the DOT in Indiana, and Interior in Colorado. It would be a material step towards "draining the swamp".
Or even more beholden to industry as they live closer to industry than they do to other government agencies, making them even more of a revolving door than they are already. It's tradeoffs all the way down!
Moving the defense industry to be less-concentrated in Los Angeles was deliberate and wasn't moving to "frontier" towns. It was moving to towns that were created for one purpose but had been somewhat "skipped over" after that in favor of the biggest cities.
I think it's probably worth trying to incentivize that more today. It still happens organically some (big companies moving HQs out of expensive areas, for instance), but probably could stand to happen more.