While the regional media in Asia readily documents the nearly daily instances of detected gold smuggling to India and gold smuggling to Japan, they rarely if ever consider the underlying problem. Gold smuggling is a symptom of a problem. And that problem is that these governments are imposing penal taxes, costs and frictions on the free ownership and free movement of gold, thereby distorting the ability of people to choose to save in invest in the ultimate form of money, which is and always has been gold.