Host Chris Matthews: “The message coming out of the Tea Party people, and lot of them are good people, is every man for himself, basically. ‘No more taxes, no more government, no more everything. No more safety net. No more health care for everybody. Everybody just get out there, make your buck, save it, screw the government, move on.’ Right? You know these people, if they were every man for himself down in that mine they wouldn’t have gotten out.”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka: “That’s exactly right.”
Matthews: “They would have been killing each other after about two days.”
Now I've often said B Hussein Obama (the oracle in Matthew's screwed up brain) is not qualified to run the night shift at a McDonalds. Now the TEA Party is much more for free enterprise and liberty from government and bureaucratic abuse. Well, Daniel Henninger wrote an excellent piece on this and how we had the assets to save those men.
Daniel Henninger: Capitalism Saved the Miners - WSJ.com
It needs to be said. The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.Wait, he offered his drill...you mean a government bureaucrat didn't put out a request for bids with racial and sex set asides, err affirmative action. What?????
...Wonder Land Columnist Daniel Henninger and Americas Columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady analyze the Chilean rescue.
."The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market and we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper."
Uh, yeah. That's a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that's right. Ask the miners.
If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?
Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.
This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.
Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.
This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.
Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector. Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.
Chile's health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, "I never realized that kind of thing actually existed."
The profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at the mine rescue site.
That's right. In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry. But the reality behind the miracles is the same: Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates, or someone else trumps their innovation. Most of the time, no one notices. All it does is create jobs, wealth and well-being. But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.
Some will recoil at these triumphalist claims for free-market capitalism. Why make them now?
Here's why. When a catastrophe like this occurs—others that come to mind are the BP well blowout, Hurricane Katrina, various disasters in China—a government has all its chips pushed to the center of the table. Chile succeeds (it rebuilt after the February earthquake with phenomenal speed). China flounders. Two American administrations left the public agog as they stumbled through the mess.
I got into a running debate with a leftist on a friend's blog and he insinuated I lived a shelter life. I had to point out to this idiot (as some of you know) I have a chronic illness that can blind, paralyze or kill me. But due to the work of private medical companies there are treatments available now that should allow me to live a normal life. Thanks to the private sector, not an Obamacare death panel I have that hope. Thanks to multiple people pursuing their own private interest they have developed these assets like that drill bit and were able to handle this problem.
Another thing that shows a community organized and a real leader. When the mine collapsed in May Chilian President Sebastian Piñera knew the company could not handle it and had the national oil company run the event. They used private assets to save these men and one thing you don't see around there is lawyers.
In April 2010 the Deepwater Horizon exploded and where was B Hussein Obama...fund raising and play golf. The feds have primary responsibility by law but that didn't stop him. Now the Dutch offered to help us with skimmers and other assets three days into the spill. "Thanks, but no thanks" said BO. Waiving the Jone's act would piss off his union thug masters. When the public pressure got too much Obama finally moved, waiving the Jones Act and accepted offers of assistance in late summer...but he did send the lawyer Eric Holder to see who he could sue. Maybe if he had thought of sending specialist from the Corps of Engineers that would have been useful. But he wanted to know "who's ass to kick".
And this idiot will actually get some people voting for him...damned.
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