This helps explain why Arab polymath Ibn Khaldun referred to gold prospecting and mining as the least respectable of professions, after kidnapping for ransom.4 The folly of Keynes condemning gold as money because its mining is wasteful is that it is the least wasteful of all potential metals to use as money. But the folly is doubly compounded by Keynes's “solution” to this shortcoming of gold being to propose a fiat monetary standard which has ended up dedicating far more human time, labor, and resources toward the management of the issuance of the money supply and the
