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'Capitalism saved the miners'? Only in Wonder Land
After the miners' rescue Wednesday, talk in Chile turned to mine safety and the conduct of Compañía Minera San Esteban, the corporation that owns the San Jose mines where the miners were trapped. On Thursday, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera publicly addressed safety issues, vowing "fundamental changes in how businesses treat their workers."
Stories about San Esteban's horrible record are legion (e.g., here and here). The company has been host to a number of deaths at its mines in recent years, and accusations of safety violations including the charge that it ignored orders to install safety equipment--a condition of its reopening after a previous accident--which might have made an earlier escape possible for some miners.
Moreover, during the debacle, San Esteban, which played no part in the miners' rescue, pled poverty and claimed it could not pay the trapped miners wages. As London's Independent reported, San Esteban "says it has no money to continue paying their wages, let alone cope with the lawsuits that will inevitably arise from the ordeal."
All in all, one might say it wasn't an episode in which capitalism cloaked itself in glory. That is, unless one is Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page director and "Wonder Land" columnist Daniel Henninger. In his October 14 column, "Capitalism Saved the Miners: The Profit = Innovation Dynamic Was Everywhere at the Mine Rescue Site," Henninger argued that the miners owed their rescue to a special drill bit developed by a private U.S. company. That was his entire argument.
Henninger's real motive seemed to be to use the miners' rescue to rebut a bit of Obama campaign rhetoric in which the president had sarcastically dismissed notion of unqualified faith in markets.