Clueless Do-Gooders Make Africa’s Conflict Mineral Mines Even More Dangerous
5th August 2015
I have muttered around here more than a few times about the various idiocies of the Blood in the Mobile campaign. This was the idea that we could stop the appalling (and true) levels of violence in Eastern Congo’s mining trade by making American companies fill out lots of documents.
The idea was that if they all had to say whether they used conflict minerals, they’d all prefer to be able to say “no” and therefore there wouldn’t be the violence over the minerals trade that happens today.
We were told that this would cost some $10m originally, one cent on the price of each mobile phone. By the time the legislature got at it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it would cost $4bn in the first year alone.
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