Salt

Salt is the only rock we eat, and Mark Kurlansky has written a world history of salt that anyone who proposes to understand business, politics and history should read this book next.  I bought it about eight years ago, and lent it to others, including a grade school daughter, who have read it and praised it.  I finally got around to reading it.  Stunning!

Trade, trade patterns, politics, war, society, culture all have been one way or another grounded in salt trade for millennia.  Although plentiful, salt was easy to control, or hard to acquire, thus being a medium of oppression throughout history.  Mahatma Gandhi was a negligible figure until his march on the salt works.  Then Britain got vicious.

The book is a fast read full of great observations: how the English saltworks at Cheshire, where brine pools formed allowing salt to be extracted through wood fired evaporation method, might be more competitive if coal could be found closer.  A prospector hit rock salt 90 feet down while looking for coal, and abandoned the search.  Of course, this explained why brine pools formed, water sluiced under ground through salt veins and then appeared above ground as brine pools.  It a classic example of failing to see the forest for the trees, the search for coal went on.  Perhaps it was the countless people employed evaporating brine that drove the myopic search for coal, but in time it did dawn on someone to just dig up the rock salt and skip the evaporation.

For we free marketers the book is especially telling for its description of property rights, natural rights, the violation thereof, the paradox of less government equalling more prosperity and security, innovation and entrepreneurship, distribution and other topics upon which the self-employed are keen.  Particularly edifying is the story of the Hanseatic League, a rather seaborne nation with representatives in ports, which developed a reputation for quality and ethics admired by all.  It is another example of anarchy in action, order out of chaos.  Sadly as the league grew in wealth, they began to use violence instead of trade to enforce their views, and they went into decline, since english and dutch were better at violence than the Hanseatic "nation."

Although Kurlansky does not point out the parallels to salt and the modern drive t control oil, the comparison is inescapable.  His history of France, the taxes on salt, the monopolies and violence very much mirrors USA today, with similar interference in the drug trade in America.  Others have pointed out how theft of retirement funds by government in pre-revolutionary france led to revolution, we can add salt tax as another.  It is scary to observe the parallels.  The revolutionaries abolished the hated salt taxes, but as revolutions go, Napoleon reinstated the salt taxes with a vengeance.  It should not be surprising that if the tea party revolutionaries are successful, we'll see much worse than we've seen under  Clinton/Bush, etc.  History teaches us that.

I regret I did not read this book years ago, get to it next.

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