

Capitalism Saved the Miners - hnal943
http://online.wsj.com/article/wonder_land.html

======
spokey
I'm not going to bother to track down the source of every contribution to this
effort, so I may have a few of the details wrong, but doesn't it seem like you
could also write this article exactly the other way?

* The mining company is essentially bankrupt and relied extensively on multinational government efforts to extract the miners, provide logistical support, etc.

* The Chilean government is now providing physical and mental medical care.

* It seems like one of the first stories that broke about this incident was the company saying "we can't afford to pay these guys while they are trapped. please help". The Chilean government (or possibly a miner's union) likely provided some of the money the miner's families lived off of the past 70 days and that they'll use in the coming weeks as the miners recover.

* The escape capsule was designed, built and contributed by NASA.

* NASA advised the Chilean government (who was coordinating the rescue effort) on how to keep the miners physically and mentally fit.

etc.

That's a fun headline and all, but the Worker's Weekly News could run a
similar story under the heading "Collective Action, Big Gov't Saved the
Miners".

~~~
spokey
Also, that guy running the drill was flown in from Afghanistan, right? I
suspect he is likely to be a government contractor (capitalist/state
partnership) and was probably brought back on military flight.

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ataggart
I can't resist making a point about "capitalism" and "socialism." Rand used to
identify certain terms and ideas as "anti-concepts," that is, terms that
actually function to obscure our understanding rather than facilitating it,
making it harder for us to grasp other, legitimate concepts; one important
category of anti-concepts is what Rand called the "package deal," referring to
any term whose meaning conceals an implicit presupposition that certain things
go together that in actuality do not. Although Rand would not agree with the
following examples, I've become convinced that the terms "capitalism" and
"socialism" are really anti-concepts of the package-deal variety.

Libertarians sometimes debate whether the "real" or "authentic" meaning of a
term like "capitalism" is (a) the free market, or (b) government favoritism
toward business, or (c) the separation between labor and ownership, an
arrangement neutral between the other two; Austrians tend to use the term in
the first sense; individualist anarchists in the Tuckerite tradition tend to
use it in the second or third.[12] But in ordinary usage, I fear, it actually
stands for an amalgamation of incompatible meanings.

Suppose I were to invent a new word, "zaxlebax," and define it as "a metallic
sphere, like the Washington Monument." That's the definition — "a metallic
sphere, like the Washington Monument." In short, I build my ill-chosen example
into the definition. Now some linguistic subgroup _might_ start using the term
"zaxlebax" as though it just meant "metallic sphere," _or_ as though it just
meant "something of the same kind as the Washington Monument." And that's
fine. But _my_ definition incorporates both, and thus conceals the false
assumption that the Washington Monument is a metallic sphere; any attempt to
use the term "zaxlebax," meaning what _I_ mean by it, involves the user in
this false assumption. That's what Rand means by a package-deal term.

Now I think the word "capitalism," if used with the meaning most people give
it, is a package-deal term. By "capitalism" most people mean neither the free
market _simpliciter_ nor the prevailing neomercantilist system _simpliciter_.
Rather, what most people mean by "capitalism" is _this free-market system that
currently prevails in the western world_. In short, the term "capitalism" as
generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free
market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government
favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it _the
assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business_.

And similar considerations apply to the term "socialism." Most people don't
mean by "socialism" anything so precise as state ownership of the means of
production; instead they really mean something more like "the opposite of
capitalism." Then if "capitalism" is a package-deal term, so is "socialism" —
it conveys opposition to the free market, and opposition to neomercantilism,
as though these were one and the same.

And that, I suggest, is the function of these terms: to blur the distinction
between the free market and neomercantilism. Such confusion prevails because
it works to the advantage of the statist establishment: those who want to
defend the free market can more easily be seduced into defending
neomercantilism, and those who want to combat neomercantilism can more easily
be seduced into combating the free market. Either way, the state remains
secure.

Source: <http://mises.org/daily/2099>

------
_delirium
This is a very strange article. It seems to be mostly a generic rant, with a
very thin topical hook to give him a reason to republish the rant today.
Pretty bad even by the standards of the WSJ editorial page; reads like the
mirror image of a DailyKos editorial, with generic political invective and a
poor command of the facts.

edit: Looked up his past contributions, and... he has some pretty unusual
views. One of his previous columns seems to be arguing that atheists are
destroying capitalism, because capitalism needs the morality that religion
provides in order to work.
(<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122714101083742715.html>)

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tptacek
Wait, what? Capitalism put them in the fucking mine.

~~~
pg
There were mines in communist countries too. I think the claim of the article
is that without the profit motive there wouldn't also have been the interest
in exploring new markets that produced the drill that saved the miners. And
they have a point there, because a lot of the technology used in communist
countries was copied from capitalist ones. Communist countries would have been
even poorer without capitalist ones doing R&D for them.

~~~
tptacek
They were mining gold, in a mine that had a history of prior safety accidents.

Also, what does this have to do with "capitalism vs. socialism"? I'm a
capitalist, and I think this op-ed is ridiculous.

~~~
ryandvm
Agreed. Technology put them in, and technology got them out.

~~~
maxharris
And this technology was developed how? People did it, and they did within a
very specific context, without which their achievements would not have been
possible. One very important element of that context is the presence of a
system of social organization that protects their individual rights, leaving
them free to think and act. Without these rights, that technology could not
exist.

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yummyfajitas
{stuff_I_hate} put the miners into the mine.

{stuff_I_like} got them out.

Yay! I've scored the most political points, I win!

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badmonkey0001
I could have gotten long-winded and torn this marvel of political propaganda
apart at many levels, but the author did the bulk of the work for me in a few
short sentences...

"Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the
Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive."

Wait! He didn't CHARGE Chile for the use of the drill?!?! Where's the
capitalism here again? Sounds more like humanitarianism and generosity to me.

------
zdw
Capitalism != Innovation, although it can create an environment where
innovation is rewarded.

I'd love to hear what he'd have to say about Sputnik.

~~~
maxharris
I'd love to know what happened to the engineers that created Sputnik.

~~~
eru
Then do some research. I just found some bits by 2 minutes of internet search.
You can find more. (And do include Russian sites. You do not even have to
learn Russian with machine translations being bearable now.)

------
elviejo
This article is foolish. From a previos thread on HN: NASA Helped the design
the escape capsule. (Government) Chliean Navy built it and so on...
(Government)

lots of things had to happen for this rescue to be successful so claiming that
any economic system has more success because of it is just stupid.

------
Yaa101
If there were only 4 of them they would have been dead by now, next time you
need at least 50 of them to make any newsworthy and thus commercial interest.

By the way, all capitalism en all socialism is both bad, healthy societies are
a mixture of both as commercial interest mostly cannibalize their
infrastructure (that is where the extra money comes from) so you need a social
system to be able to have commercial interests thrive while upholding the
infrastructure needed to do that.

