Diamond mining isn’t the only business built on a lie, though the industry’s central myth — that diamonds are scarce and therefore extremely valuable — has to be among the most brazen.
The cartels that mine South Africa, which for generations provided the lion’s share of the world’s diamond supply, perpetuated this inconceivably lucrative fiction by carefully limiting annual production, which is why smuggling was considered such a threat. Black-market diamonds — mostly smuggled out by the impoverished miners themselves — threatened the illusion of scarcity, and so mining concerns long ago became exercises in total control.
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