When a Meerkat has more Intelligence than a Coin Dealer...

David Knell joins the discussion of a tinfoil helmet US coin dealer's attempt at exegesis of something I wrote in which he attempts to depict concern about the no-questions-asked market into an alleged "Marxist conspiracy". It is difficult to show him wrong when he admonishes the dealer:

Every time you deal in an ancient coin with no regard for where it came from, you are encouraging others to do likewise and encouraging looters to continue destroying the evidence on which history is built in order to supply more of them. That continues in a never-ending cycle until every undisturbed site has gone. It really is that simple! No amount of fluff and no amount of flannel can alter that fundamental fact. It really is that simple!

Knell points out that those who wish to protect the future of ancient coin collecting as a socially-acceptable hobby should do so by using only "sound arguments and rational compromise rather than expose the trade to ridicule by consistently flying in the face of common sense". He assumes that coin dealers are at all capable of coming up with anything like sound arguments. They have not - collectively or individually - done so up to now. All they have come up with is the ACCG and employing such a person as Peter Tompa with all his sniping as their paid lobbyist. No-questions-asked coin dealers who defend their "right" to freely sell apparently freshly-surfaced and undocumented artefacts of unknown origins are the coin trade's own worst enemies.


Vignette: Dugup artefact dealers and the company they keep