Miners have a right to mine – but not at all costs

Miners have a right to mine – but not at all costs

Here is a tough question – what are the limits of legitimate mining? As Lord Keynes is famously reputed to have said, everything depends on everything else. What is mining? What is legitimate?

I’m going to take as my starting point that mining is legitimised by the rule of law. The kind of acceptable behaviour that one might observe in a liberal democracy is very different from that in a dictatorship.

Another way of stating the case is to argue that the social licence to mine varies in time and place.

Many mining companies, however, are of the view that they have unlimited licence to mine. That once their intentions are self-declared to be noble that there can be no limit on their behaviour.

The rule of law

The thing is this: however noble “mining” might be, in a liberal democracy, under the rule of law, mining must be conducted through both non-violent and non-coercive means.

Restricting violence and coercion is a legitimate function of government.

As the great liberal economist Ludwig von Mises indicated:

One must be in a position to compel the person who will not respect the lives, health, personal freedom, or private property of others to acquiesce in the rules of life in society. This is the function that the liberal doctrine assigns to the state: the protection of property, liberty, and peace.

We might want to believe that mining companies should be able to issue false and misleading media releases, or even conspire to overthrow the democratically elected government without interference from the authorities. But the proper way to do so is to campaign for those changes at the ballot box.

Small wonder the broader mining industry is turning to non-liberal and non-democratic means to pursue their aims.

Making miners accountable for their actions

The fossil fuel industry is a prime example. There is an internationally orchestrated, well-funded, and apparently sophisticated campaign in favour of fossil fuel investment.

Miners have the right to campaign for their policies, but they don’t have the right to provide misleading stock market advice.

The argument that fossil fuels have social costs does not undermine my position at all. Yes, the social costs of fossil fuels exceed zero – and it is clear that these costs exceed the social benefits of fossil fuel usage.