Last century, Americans company were coming in Canada, pumping iron and buying mining companies for cheap. With the same iron, they shipped it back into the US, made steel with it and sold it back to us at like 5x times the original price. I know "capitalist/freedom/etc", but this type of business doesn't create any plus-value.
That's a rather ignorant statement on your part. No added value? Try building something out of iron ore. As it comes out of the ground, it's rather useless. Refining ore into steel is an energy-intensive process. Try telling me with a straight face that there's no value in that.
Maybe I was not clear.
If you take the whole process (mining iron, processing it, selling it), you create value, I agree with that. But to get this value, you have a part of cost and a part of profit. The problem in the situation I exposed is that the biggest part of the cost was on our shoulders and the biggest part of the profit was in the pockets of the Americans. By cost, I'm talking about health cost like injuries or illnesses due to the mining part that need to be assumed by the society. I'm also talking about environmental damage and the fact that these resources are non-renewable.
Miners were treated like shit back in the days. It wasn't until they started to fight back and unionized themselves that the situation changed for the best. Today, we have knowledge, expertise and technology to do the same job a lot more efficiently.
