"Need us!"

England and America, said George Bernard Shaw, are two countries divided by a common language.

They are also united by some common problems, and it is time to look at the British miners' strike, for British experience often precedes its American repetition.

For example, the British clergy started its march to insanity long before the American clergy went nuts. In the 1940s, Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury (and member of the Editorial Board of the Daily Worker), proclaimed the USSR to be the closest thing on earth to the Kingdom of Heaven and exhorted his countrymen to follow the Soviets in building God's Kingdom here and now.

By now not even the common language divides the reverends of hypocritical irrationality. It is not just that they damn all contacts with the South African segregationists even as they call for cooperation with the Soviet murderers, or that they abhor US help to embattled democracy in Central America even as they yawn over genocide in Afghanistan. It is that these sages who make morality their profession have not yet discovered the morality of capitalism, the system that channels human greed into the avenues of maximum common benefit, and the system that rejects coercion in favor of voluntary choice.

The bishops of the Church of England have now come out for the striking miners, posturing as the friends of the poor and downtrodden, and the way the US media have presented the strike ("against the layoffs and closure of mines by the government"), you might think the bishops are driven by compassion.

But there is something more significant in this strike. Perhaps for the first time, this is a strike not for higher wages or better working conditions, or even for jobs in general: the British welfare state has guaranteed to offer every miner a job in the same coal field, plus a transfer allowance of up to $1,800. The government-run Coal Board simply wanted to close some mines so ludicrously unprofitable that such an offer still saves money. Even the average price of British coal is twice that of US coal and almost three times that of Australian coal. With nuclear power, oil, gas, and coal that promises to be profitable if the mines are modernized, it makes no sense for the British taxpayer to subsidize unneeded make-work jobs.

In America, the unions are not the main danger of coercive redistribution. Here, the coercives use more damaging weapons than broken glass bottles: brainwash and censorship by the mass media. Their work (if any) is neither backbreaking nor mind-numbing, for they are mostly found in the press, the educational system and in the three branches of government, especially its unelected parts.

Unlike the British miners, these coercive redistributors may now be winning, but eventually they must lose. They cannot forever keep people from realizing that parasites need a host, but a host does not need any parasites.