Those environmental and human costs are central banking's, not gold's

12:33p ET Sunday, December 1, 2013

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

How studiously Western journalists strive to miss the crucial point about gold.

One of them, Matthew Hart, who is touring news media outlets to promote his new book about the monetary metal, whose excerption in Vanity Fair magazine was brought to your attention a couple of weeks ago --

http://www.gata.org/node/13233

-- went on National Public Radio in the United States for five minutes yesterday and lamented the extreme human and environmental costs of getting the metal out of the ground. Audio and a transcript of the interview are posted at NPR's Internet site here:

http://www.npr.org/2013/11/30/247915978/gold-ponders-the-glittering-meta...

NPR's interviewer, Scott Simon, eagerly suggested that the metal isn't worth the trouble: "Hearing what it takes to get gold out of the ground might make people look down at, let's say, a gold wedding band on their finger and wonder if it's really worth it."

Yes, Mr. Simon, let's stop mining gold and continue to allow central banks to set the value of all capital, labor, goods, and services in the world -- and not only to set those values but to set them surreptitiously and undemocratically.

Of course NPR won't be doing a segment about the cost of central banking any time soon.

Yes, the cost of gold extraction is huge, both the environmental cost and the human cost, and those costs are not adequately covered by the market price of the metal itself. But that's not the fault of gold or the miners or the terminally obtuse mining industry but the fault of government policy to suppress the gold price and thereby preclude gold's use as a currency competing with government currencies, policy long documented by GATA here:

http://www.gata.org/taxonomy/term/21

A free-market price for gold would more than cover the environmental and human costs of getting it out of the ground. Those environmental and human costs are actually not the costs of gold mining but the costs of central banking.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.