NPR Economic News Program (Transcript)

From the pony express to carriages, horses used to be the workforce for America – until the steam engine came about and took away horse livelihood. The more air-polluting factories were being built, the more the horse community could see the writing on the wall: their jobs would disappear. Before long, the rise of automobiles crushed the horse job market, leaving hundreds of thousands of unemployed horses in its wake.

“We are desperate to get jobs these days,” nickered the horse community activist named Charlie. “The machine is working against us. With horsepower being eliminated, I find more and more of my friends and colleagues losing their jobs. The fact that they culturally appropriated the word ‘horsepower’ to describe their machines only adds insult to injury. I am lucky I got picked up by the traveling rodeo. Others slip into depression, start drinking, and get in trouble with police.”

With capitalist free markets further wrecking the familiar world, all the horses can do is neigh at the fact they have become archaic. And while humans who lose their jobs qualify for unemployment insurance, horses do not.

“My kind has not received any compensation or health benefits from the government,” said one horse who asked to only be identified as The Horse’s Mouth. “They send us packing out into the wild, thinking we can make it on our own. Not everyone can. What kind of government would treat us like that? If they had any horse sense, they would accommodate our kind.”

“If there was a government regulation that would mandate pen makers to design pens for writing with hooves, we would have sent tons of letters to Congress about our disenfranchisement,” said The Horse’s Mouth. “But all we can do is protest the unequal treatment by aimlessly marching through the landscape where no one can see us. And even if they did, we don’t have pens or markers to write a single decent sign to communicate our grievances. So everyone assumes we’re just happily stampeding through the prairies. We’re not.”