Toronto's Globe and Mail published a long essay by Christopher Pollon, a Vancouver-based journalist who focuses on the mining industry, arguing for prohibiting gold mining on account of the environmental damage it often does.
Toward the end of his essay Pollon acknowledges gold's monetary function but suggests that it could be sustained by digitizing unmined gold from certified reserves, creating another sort of digital currency like bitcoin.
Pollon's essay is headlined "The Case for Leaving Gold in the Ground" and can be found here:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-case-for-leaving-gold-in-the-ground/
Of course Pollon is probably not aware of the longstanding gold price suppression policy of Western central banks and particularly the U.S. government, a policy that has been documented by GATA for more than 20 years and is summarized comprehensively here:
So it may not have occurred to him that to prohibit gold mining is not just to prohibit physical possession of new supplies of gold but also to leave with central banks -- that is, governments -- control of the biggest supplies of the monetary metal and thus control of the metal's price. Prohibiting gold mining means tightening central banking's control of money, financial systems, and the value of all capital, labor, goods, and services in the world -- the control of everything and everybody.
In turn that would increase the power of government across the board, particularly the warmaking power, which as a practical matter can be restrained only by limits on the money supply or alternatives to government money. The only practical restraint on government's power to issue unlimited money is physical gold in the hands of outsiders, functioning as an independent means of exchange.
The digitalization of unmined gold reserves isn't likely to accomplish anything, for who would verify and trust it, especially in time of war or financial stress? It wouldn't be any more secure than bitcoin and other digital currencies, which are based on a supply believed to be finite and the assumption that government will not interfere with the internet and the ordinary operation of banking systems. (Could Pollon really be that naive?)
Yes, gold mining does a lot of environmental damage -- but perhaps most because its price has been so suppressed by central bank intervention in the gold markets. This price suppression increases the incentive of all miners, not just the "artisanal" miners cited by Pollon, to evade the cost of environmental remediation, since that cost can't be built into a suppressed gold price without making gold's mining unprofitable.
Besides, the environmental damage done by gold mining is nothing compared to the environmental damage done by stupid imperial wars, like those waged almost constantly since the end of World War II -- wars made politically possible only by money creation and inflation.
Gold as a form of money that can be produced and maintained independently of governments and central banks is the essential mechanism of limited government and individual liberty. High-minded as prohibiting gold mining may sound to Pollon, it would be another giant step toward totalitarianism.
About the author
