you don’t know where anything comes from

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an excellent investigation exposing how the United States Mint buys its gold from Colombian drug cartels, despite a law that it should only purchase legally mined American gold.The main thing that struck me about the scheme was how everything superficially looked great on paper. Each cartel miner has an official license, so the middlemen buy their gold without asking any questions. Then they legally sell it to American refineries, who melt it down and resell to the U.S. Mint, which doesn’t inquire where the original metal came from.I’ve been thinking a lot about this article, because we all take shortcuts that seem too good to be true. It’s so easy to order a wool sweater on Amazon, wait for a box to materialize on your doorstep, and call it a day. But unless you know the sheep, and you know who knitted the sweater, and you know who sold it, and you know who transported it, you can’t guarantee that you didn’t just contribute to animal…