Right of Assembly

Rabies and Civilization

I live in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which is currently at the epicenter of the skunk rabies outbreak.

2011 Map: http://nmhealth.org/ERD/HealthData/documents/AnimalRabiesbyCounty_2011_017.pdf

There have been rabid skunks trapped as close as eight blocks away from me in Carlsbad. The map is misleading.

Recently some people with an unvaccinated dog with puppies all had to be given rabies shots, small children and all, because the bitch got exposed to a rabid skunk, and she contracted rabies.

The bitch and her puppies were euthanized, of course.

I have a friendly acquaintanceship with the manager of our local animal shelter, which is long-suffering though very well run overall, by the Noah’s Ark Foundation.

I emailed her about this. She wrote back that they are very worried, that they in fact are expected by the State to euthanize any incoming untagged dog (and presumably cats, too) that smells like skunk.

But skunks don’t always spray, she noted.

She pointed out further that when things get too bad, the legal response can run towards mandating that animal control people shoot all loose untagged dogs on sight.

Alternately, they can haul them all into the animal shelter and demand that the shelter personnel euthanize all of the animals that are not tagged, after the four day hold during which the owners can retrieve them.

She is a nice person, this animal shelter manager, and very strong, but she surely does not want to have to deal with having to kill just about everybody who comes into the shelter. She wrote me that only about 2.5 or so percent of the intake animals are tagged.

It is already very difficult for them. There is a high burnout level with the shelter staff. This business of killing people’s abandoned pets does not come without its spiritual cost.

The abandoned pets will vary. Some will be suspicious, beaten. Some will be ill with a wide variety of diseases.

But many will be reasonably socialized, and trusting. What does it do to a person, to have to kill all of these animals, over and over again, year after year?

And now they have to deal with the rabies epidemic.

More death. More killing. Less trust. More anger.

If we were all feral, we’d just deal with consequences. It would not be about rewards and punishments.

But civilization is all about rewards and punishments. Who is getting punished here? Who is getting rewarded?

I see lots of punishment, with thin soup for rewards.

Macroeconomics Is Bullshit

Economic theory assumes a world of rational agents that weigh options and make choices.

If you get caught up in the fake reality of economic assumptions, you can almost imagine people investing in their education to gain job skills that increase their income by more than the cost of the required training, and working 10% harder to achieve a compensation increase of at least 10%, etc.

If you divorce yourself from real human emotions and experience for long enough, the Dogma Premises of Capitalism might even start to seem like how things really work.

But if you spend time with the real person who loses their job, instead of the theoretical displaced workers who are reallocated in the economists’ fantasy world, you’ll see that job displacement isn’t just an economic mechanism to reallocate labor to more efficiently meet market demand. Instead, it involves real people, real pain, psychological costs, and other unintended negative consequences (see photo below) that aren’t included when economists calculate the friction costs associated with job retraining.

A just, caring, and economically efficient society would never allow unemployment to exist. Everyone should always be secure in the notion that every single day of their lives they could be compensated comparably to anyone else who works equally hard and well on something of social significance, whether it be street cleaning, fence mending, or managing a complex endeavor. What justification could there ever be for allowing someone to sit idle, for preventing someone from contributing and getting rewarded, for inspiring interactions like this: