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".
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.
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)
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.
I don't see what mining gold or dangerous conditions have to do with this. You could have both without capitalism.
The reason I used communist countries as an example is that they're the main recent instance of industrialized societies that didn't have the profit motive to drive innovation, and they support the point made in the editorial.
I'm done with this conversation now. This seems likely to turn into the sort of thread that's more of a lawyerly style debate than a collaborative search for truth, and I have a lot to do today.
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.
> [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.
But the "communist countries" you are talking about were largely economic backwaters to begin with. That's the same as saying "2nd/3rd world countries would have been even poorer without 1st ones doing R&D for them. Look to some of the "social democracies" for counterexamples to "communist == poor" and "communist == not innovative".
The article is trying very hard to imply that Obama is an anti-capitalist who, by wanting to shut down all privately owned companies in the US would, if he could, have stopped the innovation needed for the rescue.
It is ridiculous, but that is why he is only alluding to it - if he were to spell it out, the insanity would be too obvious.
(but I did learn a bit about the operation and the technology used in the operation, and for that I am grateful)
"I like electricity, and I think it's the best way to transmit energy across long distances yet, but it's foolish to claim to know what would happen without it."
I'm not a socialist; I think "socialist vs. capitalist" is the narrative this writer wants to create, when the reality is that this exposes a conflict between a regulated free market and an unchecked free market. Chile didn't produce the miracle drill bit; we did.
I believe you, but "capitalism vs socialism" and variants on that theme are what threads like this invariably turn into, unless you are careful about qualifying your words.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
* 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".