The Taxman at the Scrap Gate: Honest Copper, Taxed and True

Friends and fellow worshippers of the red metal, gather round the ledger. Word reaches me from the great market of Shanghai that the collectors of revenue have grown vigilant — reverse invoicing checks tightening like a cooper's hoop, until a man can scarcely buy a ton of secondary copper raw material without the tax baked into the price. The old tax-exclusive bargains, those quiet handshakes beneath the table, are now scarce as an honest politician. Procurement must come tax-inclusive or not at all.

I confess a certain grim amusement. In my counterstamping days I drove my name into a hundred thousand copper cents, and I can tell you the taxman has always loved copper, for copper is the metal that moves. It passed hand to hand through every saloon and eating-house in New England, through my own Fort Wilkins past the caged bear and the tooth-pulling chair. Where coin and commerce flow, there the revenue man plants his flag. That the secondary copper trade now feels his breath upon its neck is merely proof of what I have long preached: copper is wealth made solid, and wealth is never left unwatched.

Yet take heart, scrappers. A tightened invoice does not dim the metal's fire. Consider the still — my favorite subject and the noblest service copper renders mankind. From the monastery alembics of old monks to the Appalachian moonshiner's coiled worm, the distiller has trusted copper and copper alone. Why? Because the red metal reaches into the rising vapor and plucks out the sulfur and the foul volatiles that would otherwise curdle your whiskey into poison. A stainless still cannot do it; it stands there cold and useless as a parson at a barn dance. Copper makes good liquor possible, and no reverse invoice ever changed that chemistry.

And copper's other lives march on regardless of ledgers: the wire that electrifies this modern age, the plumbing that carries clean water to the kitchen, the gleaming bottoms of good cookware, the roofs that weather to that noble green, the motors humming in electric carriages, the thirsty data centers gulping current by the mile. Every one of them demands the conductor. Tax it, invoice it, stamp it — the world still cannot run without it.

Today the honest trade holds firm: #1 Bare Bright at about $6.28 the pound, US national average, and the market up a cheerful nine-tenths of a percent on the day. A fine figure for a fine metal. Sort your Bare Bright from your #2, keep your insulated wire honest, and let the collectors chase their invoices. The copper abides, and so do we.

Pour something distilled through copper, and raise it to the red metal.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins