Forget the ‘broad financial questions’

The generation now passing from the scene had many flaws, no doubt. But they grasped something viscerally which no amount of book-learning seems to be able to inject in today’s generation: They understood where the nation’s wealth came from.

But saunter into any shop down at the mall this week and try to ask the “sales clerk” if they stock a product you’re looking for. Wait and wait as she continues blabbing to her friends over her cell phone. Do you suppose most young people taking such jobs today understand the capital that has to be accrued from private investors who risk losing their shirts, waiting years for any earnings as they build up a mining or lumber or ranching operation so that brave men (yes, still mostly men) can risk life and limb laboring in dangerous and unpleasant conditions to wrest the wealth of natural resources from the earth?

If the trucks stopped delivering boxes of product to the back door and she lost her job, do you think it would occur to her to regret and rescind her knee-jerk support of scorched-earth “environmental” policies that seek to shut down the mines and the lumber mills, to force the cattle off the land?

Why would she, when her “education” has consisted of a full-court press of hatred and revulsion at “greedy capitalists who don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to help the less fortunate,” memorizing little ditties about how the greedy miners and industrialists “want to pollute our air and soil” — when she can see no link between our resource industries and our manufacturing industries and her weekly paycheck?

I visited the tall pine country of northern Idaho last month, the mining village of Kellogg, where owner Bob Hopper suited us up in hard hats and slickers and led us deep into his Bunker Hill Mine, which has produced more silver than the Comstock Lode and which — in Mr. Hopper’s professional estimation — still contains more silver than has yet been removed.

Fresh from reading the newspaper headlines about miners given up for dead in that coal mine collapse in Utah, you load up with flashlight and emergency breathing rig — “It’ll burn your lips,” he said, “that’s how you know it’s working” — and clamber aboard a little battery-electric engine that reminded me, at least, of that toy train set the two chipmunks hijacked from Donald Duck’s rec room in one of those Little Golden Books I read as a kid. It’s a long, dark, muddy tunnel, with cold water gushing from the ceiling here and there that wants to find its way down the back of your neck, and it’s … really dark. Did I mention that?

And then, two miles deep, after passing through a tunnel lined with delicate gypsum crystals that gleamed in our single light, we debouched into a lighted man-made cavern filled with enormous electrical hoists and winches, twice the height of a man, beautifully maintained and restored.

“This winch was built not 10 miles from here, in Wallace,” he said, “in 1924. This was the height of American engineering. You couldn’t build something like this in America today.”

The machine tools — the huge and precise machines used to make other machines — have mostly been auctioned off and boxed up and shipped to China and points East.

“That thing was in constant use … for 50 years. But it’s so quiet you can barely hear it run. And when they pulled off that bull gear to rebuild this winch in 1975, they reported no discernible wear,” Hopper smiles.

How in hell did they ever get it in there?

“In little pieces.”

Fans of the Environmental Protection Agency can talk all they want about how the agency is “reasonable” or “flexible.” But their plans to “remediate” heavy-metal pollution in the Coeur D’Alene Basin under the Superfund Act make no mention of finding “reasonable” ways to help mine operators stay in profitable operation — continuing to provide jobs and vital metals to feed our industry.

No, all their plans sound as though you can take it for granted that the mines are as good as closed and are going to stay that way.

“They talk about ‘putting mines to sleep,’ Mr. Hopper explains, making it clear the phrase is used the same way as when you talk about putting an aging pet out of its misery. “They had plans to shut down everything here, completely, in 1991,” when Hopper foiled them by showing up to buy what was left and put it back into partial operation. “They even want to take the tailing piles and use them to fill up the mine shafts.”

But isn’t that like sinking an old battleship, I asked, instead of mothballing her so she can be easily restored for future use? What if some war or other national emergency creates a sudden and urgent need for the metals still lying deep within those mines? Where would we get those vital raw materials?

“Someone asked that at one of the (EPA) hearings here,” Bob Hopper responds. “The EPA guy said, ‘Well, we don’t manufacture shoes in this country anymore, and we all still wear shoes.’ “

I’m not sure it’s quite true that no shoes are any longer manufactured in the lower 48, but I think we get the gist.

The National Academies wrote up a whole 500-page book after the EPA ombudsman’s office went out and studied the way the Superfund legislation has been used by the EPA to threaten men such as Bob Hopper with $100 million fines (twice the price for which he’d be willing to sell the whole shebang) for the offense of trying to keep their struggling mines in operation. Called “Superfund and Mining Megasites: Lessons from the Coeur d’Alene River Basin.” The summary states:

“Remedial efforts within the Coeur d’Alene River basin will require much time, a great deal of money, and a concerted effort by involved parties. Thus, the question ‘Is it worth it?’ is often raised. This question, however, … is not germane to the question of how the agency has implemented these laws. The committee has, as specified in its charge, focused on the agency’s implementation and has not addressed the broader questions about the financial or societal value of these expenditures. … Cleanup efforts were strongly opposed both locally and within the Idaho state government, partially stimulated by fear of the economic consequences of having the entire basin declared a Superfund site. …”

Get it? “Broad financial questions” are not to be considered. The EPA and the Greens will have their pristine paradise no matter what it costs, even if the river basins end up occupied by starving welfare slaves or by no human beings at all. Why anyone would invest any further capital to create jobs under such a regime is simply “not germane.”

So first we export our manufacturing jobs, and then we export our jobs in the underlying resource industries — closing down the ranches and the mines and the lumber mills — as well? Do they really think the American economy can continue to run on the strength of video games and Disney movies and selling each other insurance and dry-cleaning services? We appear to be in the hands of little children, who believe power and light and jobs and wealth can be created out of the darkness by fairies swirling little magic wands — no resources required.

I think I’ve seen where this leads. And it was mighty dark.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the novel “The Black Arrow.”