America Should Learn a Lesson About Domestic Mining From Great Britain

Implications: Some archaeologists believe that the mediterranean bronze age was cut short, and superceeded, prematurely,  by the iron age, by the refusal of Greek and Phoenician traders to take the financial risk of obtaining tin from the distant and dangerous 'tin isles,' known now as the British Isles. Now those same tin islanders will shortly be resuming production because of a new risk, the risk of not prospering from being able to supply natural resources domestically, which otherwise would have to be imported from unfriendly and, some would say, dangerous places far away. Do you suppose that America would ever figure out that the only reason that it does not produce its abundant domestic resources of both major and minor metals, which it has,  is because of an anti-mining bias that is illogical in the extreme?

Analysis: Does this sound familiar? The industrial revolution began in Great Britain because it had iron ore, coal, and the concept of private property. Innovative men could prosper and rise to the heights of society by creating new wealth, based not on the ownership of land, but on the ownership of the rights to their ideas.

The end of the absolutist power of the landed aristocracy was only then a matter of time; it went fairly smoothly in the U.K., and its intellectual daughter, the United States, not so smoothly in places like Germany, Russia, and China.

The UK today may be much more socialist than capitalist, as indeed is all of Europe, but the UK has a survivalist mentality in its internationalist approach to economics and global trade. This is based on its status as a resource-challenged island through most of its history. Iron, or at least easy access to it, and coal in the nineteenth century and oil in the late twentieth century have given the UK long periods of independent prosperity even in the face of the political disasters that arose out of its mercantile imperialism and the wars fought to preserve Britain's global status as the world's preeminent trading nation until the end of World War II.

Britain's' survival instinct is more finely honed than Americas, perhaps because of her size and faster response to changes in world conditions.

Thus, as the prices of metals rise and stay at high prices Britain's innate feel for the global economy pushes for the reopening of tin mines in Cornwall. The government weighs the costs of producing the tin against the environmental challenges and finds that modern mining technology has raised the overall health and safety level of such mining, for a low enough added cost, to make such ventures become positive contributions to the nation's economic life. In addition technology has made the extraction and refining of lower grade ores economical thus giving the potential for ever more wealth creation.

Why can't Americans learn to reason in that way?

America's crass aristocracy of celebrity elites don't seem nearly as clever as the remnants of the old landed aristocracy. Perhaps there is something to education and patriotism after all.