How Capitalism Saved The Chilean Miners

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal asserts that the successful rescue of Chilean miners as signifying victory for capitalism.

Mr. Henninger writes, (bold emphasis mine)

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…

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.

In short the technology, instruments and expertise used to save the trapped miners had been a product of capitalism.

This reminds me of the great classic, “I, Pencil”, from Leonard Read which states that market, using the pencil as example, is driven by spontaneous order: No no one exactly knows how to make the pencil in the entirety, yet people using division of labor, specialization and voluntary exchange concertedly allows the pencil to be produced and be used by us, the consuming public.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Read, (bold highlights mine)

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far-off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field — paraffin being a byproduct of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

Capitalism is almost always the unheralded and unappreciated hero, for incidents like the successful rescue of Chilean miners, but has undeservingly served as the scapegoat for failures of the political order.