The horses flutter their lips without whinny while the handsome cab drivers stub their cigarette butts out on their boots. Horse dung and feed oats fume with taxi exhaust and the smell of decomposing tourists on Central Park South near the Avenue of the Americas. Animal liberationists rejoice to liberate the noble steeds from their hour long trots through the park. What torture it was. Now they can retire to the glue factory.
The Happy Dale farm the busy liberals imagined the horses would be to sold to doesn't need them. They only raise meat. Internal combustion engines pull the plow. And horses don't make good dogs.
Horses don't end up in McDonald's burgers. The Golden Arches has no reason to grind expensive equus when cow eyeballs and the sweat and blood of their workers comes so cheap. Opponents of a livable wage don't mention that people can only afford to work for the current minimum wage because it qualifies them for food stamps and other entitlements they want to kill. Right now the food stamps program some politicians want to end is really a subsidy to WalMart and fast food franchise owners.
Entry level jobs used to go to teenagers and then senior citizens. The economy continued to automate with factories becoming robot towns while low skill office workers were replaced by software. Farms have the largest mobile machinery on land. Where's a worker to go?
Efforts to raise the minimum wage will probably only bring more automation. McDonBot will sell you the burger and fries. Everything from dry cleaning to hair cuts will be drive thru and swipe. The service economy? Don't wait up for the milk man. The paper boy can't go digital. The car mechanic has to be a computer repairman.
But the liberals did save the horses. They have no idea how to save your job. They care about workers as they go extinct. The conservatives care about small business people who are shrinking faster than ice cubes in August. It is not a conspiracy to impoverish half the nation. It's just that too many of us are blacksmiths and the horseless carriage has arrived.
I don't have the answers and I haven't read anyone who even has any new ideas. The reason Washington is stuck in the same impasse is because each side knows perfectly well that the other side's positions are fantasy. The Tea Party wants to go back to Colonial times while the left wants to go back to the New Deal. Obama says he wants compromise. Between what? A preschool version of the Constitution and a Socialist Utopia?
The super advantage America had of being the only intact major power after the Second World War is over. It lasted longer than anyone could have hoped for. Of course, Germany and Japan bounced back first. They were fortunate enough to lose the war so we gave them a fresh start, from the ground up, after the bombing. China, for all its Mao and madness, provides a better life for its citizens than it has in centuries.
We can only rape the Earth of its resources so fast so the pie is being divided by more billions. I was about to say more evenly divided between billions but that too is a fantasy. I live in New York, with the handsome cab horses, where some hedge fund managers make more than the adult population of Detroit.
There is more social and economic mobility in the United States than in anytime in our lifetime only the vast majority of it is downward. Perhaps if we convinced biologists that factory workers are a separate and endangered species the liberals would set up petting farms for them. Better yet, let's employ unemployed factory workers by having them pull the handsome cabs through Central Park for ten bucks an hour. Call it Big Apple Rickshaw.
Happy Year of the Fire Horse.
Don Arrup
Satire1
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