Santorum And The Coal Miners

There is something to be said for Peter Lawler’s suggestion that Rick Santorum can be seen, in part, as a right-wing version of a left-wing reactionary. I read Claire Berlinski’s excellent book on Thatcher and I was struck by some of the wrinkles in the coal miners’ strike. Of course Thatcher was right. Scargill was (and to all appearances remains) a Stalinist monster who was trying to bring down an elected government through the destruction of the economy on the pretext of avoiding the closures uncompetitive coal mines. But there was more to it than Scargill. Berlinski movingly describes the miners whose sense of social utility was devastated by the closure of the mines. The Thatcher government offered benefits for the laid off miners, but government benefits without work could not give them dignity. In a reversal of what American conservatives might have expected, it was the British right that was offering welfare and the British left that was demanding government-paid workfare.

I was reminded of this when I saw Santorum talking about how the declining industries of Pennsylvania had reduced the opportunities of working-class men and how his program to end the corporate income tax on manufacturing firms would bring back high paying jobs so that today’s version of men like Santorum’s grandfather would be able to raise families. Santorum’s concerns were quite similar to those of the working-class socialists (again, not the Scargills of the world) who opposed Thatcher.

That doesn’t mean that Santorum’s tax idea was a good one. The economy of the mid-1900s isn’t coming back and, even if it does, it won’t be because the tax code favors manufacturers. We can probably do things to increase the take home pay of families in the second quartile by moving closer to a HSA/catastrophic coverage model of health insurance coverage and increasing the child tax credit and making it fully apply to payroll tax liability (and I think Santorum supports policies like these.)