Japan's recent disasters only serve to remind us of the economic realities of nuclear technology - one of the most dangerous government programs in the world. Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/nuclear
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. We start our analysis of the nuclear power industry with a quote from Nietzsche's The Dawn, Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. | |
| He opens up with a statement, or a quote, which I actually used in my master's thesis in 1994. | |
| Time flash! He wrote, Rationality ex post facto, which means justifying things after the fact. | |
| Whatever lives long... | |
| Is gradually so saturated with reason that its irrational origins become improbable? | |
| Does not almost every accurate history of the origin of something sound paradoxical and sacrilegious to our feelings? | |
| Doesn't the good historian contradict all the time? | |
| When we fail to understand the beginnings of things, we cannot understand how to end them. | |
| One example that springs to mind is the public school system. | |
| The general tax livestock impression is that the public school system came into being because children, poor benighted children, particularly poor benighted poor children, were undereducated or uneducated and therefore the government needed to step in to ensure education across the board, that it was good. And ripe and fine and tasty for all. | |
| This, of course, is nonsense. | |
| It is the complete opposite. | |
| People were much better educated before public school system came along. | |
| Literacy rates were in the high 90 percents, which government couldn't even begin to approach now. | |
| Public school came into Being to enforce cultural conformity during a time of increasing particularly Catholic fragmentation in American culture. | |
| And it was championed by people who like controlling others, of course, bureaucrats and government officials and so on. | |
| And it was championed by incompetent teachers who didn't want to have other people outcompete them or outperform them for their pay. | |
| And it was not able to be resisted. | |
| By parents, because diffuse losses always bow to concentrated benefits. | |
| So when people talk about public school, if they understand that it was the incompetent and the parochial, narrow-minded, bigoted in society who drove forward the institutionalization of public school system, then if it's taken away, who takes the blow? Incompetent teachers and control freak bigots on the political side. | |
| Well, May not be such a loss. | |
| Now, when we talk about the nuclear power industry, it's also very important to understand where it came from. | |
| In no way, shape or form did it even remotely come from the free market. | |
| This is very, very important to understand. | |
| Governments have gotten wiser After seeing the totalitarian debacles and disasters of the 20th century. | |
| See, in the totalitarian model, the government runs the bread shop. | |
| And so if there's no bread in the shop, everyone goes, the government, and they get mad at the government. | |
| And that doesn't work fundamentally for very long. | |
| On the other hand, the fascistic model allows for nominal private ownership of businesses. | |
| In other words, the ownership of businesses accrue to individuals or is allowed to be owned by individuals or corporations. | |
| But they are farmed, tax farmed, by the state. | |
| And that is very good for the state. | |
| Because if the baker is perceived as the free market, if the price of bread goes up, everyone gets mad at the baker. | |
| If the government is distributing the bread and the price goes up, everyone gets mad at the government. | |
| But if the government can hold up this straw man called the free market... | |
| Then everyone gets mad at corporations. | |
| So, for instance, if the government is controlling the economy and there's general inflation, then everyone gets mad at the government. | |
| On the other hand, if the government is controlling only the money supply through private institutions such as the Federal Reserve, then when there's inflation, what happens is everyone gets mad at the local business. | |
| You're raising your prices. | |
| You're gouging. You're this. Everyone gets mad at the oil companies rather than the Federal Reserve. | |
| It's genius. It's a wonderful pinata distraction from the real mechanics of power. | |
| So let's talk a little bit about the evolution of nuclear power. | |
| First and foremost, the Manhattan Project, which was actually begun, or was suggested to be begun by Einstein and another physicist, based upon the fear that the Nazis would develop these weapons of mass destruction, these atomic weapons, these nuclear weapons. | |
| And it ran for about five years. | |
| It employed over 130,000 people and cost over $22 billion in 2008 dollars. | |
| By the way, the Apollo program, I think that was bad. | |
| Over 14 years, almost $100 billion wasted on shooting tin cans up into space so that guys could sit inside giant penises and not feel so bad about their own cold-wrapped magnets. | |
| What happened was the nuclear industry was developed as a complete offshoot of the defense industry, right? | |
| So the defense industry generated nuclear weapons through forced taxation and indebtedness, and this spilled over into the nuclear power industry. | |
| Now, in 1953, I get this from the Center for the Stateless Society. | |
| I will put all of the links for these sources for this below. | |
| A Westinghouse executive testified before Congress in 1953 He said, if you were to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money, we would have to say no, i.e., for nuclear power. | |
| The cost of the plant would be a question mark until after we built it, and by that sole means found out the answer. | |
| We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done all the work and operated successfully. | |
| And this was simply just building it for profit. | |
| Can you imagine in a free society if you came to a board of investors or the chairman of the board or CXO level and you said, well, I really want to build a nuclear weapon but contain it inside a building so that we could generate power. | |
| They'd say, well, what is the downside? | |
| Well, the downside is it potentially could explode and it produces material which remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years and it could kill hundreds or Thousands or tens of thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands of people. | |
| Well, they'd all say you're completely insane. | |
| That liability, we couldn't conceivably ensure that. | |
| And if we as the executives of this organization approved such a measure, then If something went wrong, we would be held liable for negligence and the deaths of thousands and thousands of people and the poisoning of the earth and the polluting of the skies. | |
| We'd all end up in jail for the rest of our lives. | |
| There's got to be an easier way to make a buck. | |
| Let's go back to pushing out Faith Hill CDs. | |
| So that's what would happen, and this in fact is what happened in England in the 80s. | |
| The British, they tried to privatize The nuclear power industry in England. | |
| And so it really took it from government protected and controlled, the government protected and controlled environment, put it into the more or less free market. | |
| And British utilities, I mean, they cut their workforce considerably. | |
| They cut overhead costs in the hopes to boost profitability. | |
| The nuclear research and development was gradually wound down. | |
| In the early 1990s, financial markets, which were necessary to fund these organizations, became very concerned about taking on responsibility for the decommissioning costs of nuclear power stations. | |
| And so it forced the government to abandon the privatization of Britain's Generation 1 Magnux nuclear fleet in 1990. | |
| In other words, nobody wanted to research anymore the costs. | |
| I mean, some of this stuff needs to be stored for 20,000 or more years. | |
| I mean, who's going to enter into a contract for 20,000 years? | |
| Who's going to even assume that any company that enters into a contract now is going to be around in 100 years? | |
| More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies that were around 100 years ago are no longer even in existence today. | |
| So, there's no conceivable way that the free market, that I mean, there's no conceivable way that I can imagine, which is a long way from it being impossible. | |
| Obviously, I'm just some guy thinking, but looking at it, you know, from my experience as an entrepreneur and as a business executive, the idea that corporations would take on this kind of risk is inconceivable. | |
| And the idea that anyone would take on 10 to 20 plus thousand year waste, dangerous waste materials, inconceivable. | |
| And this has been sort of tacitly agreed to by governments. | |
| So under the terms of the Price-Anderson Act in the United States, the nuclear industry, it bears the costs of ensuring itself against liability only up to a certain cap. | |
| After that, right, so there's a certain cap. | |
| So, okay, we're insured up to X amount of dollars, and we have to pay for that insurance ourselves. | |
| But anything, any damage which we cause in excess of that cap is now going to be paid for by the taxpayer, i.e. | |
| the Chinese, i.e. | |
| the unborn. And that, of course, should sound awfully familiar to people who are familiar at all with the reality of British Petroleum, which only has to insure itself up to a certain amount. | |
| After that, the insurance costs or the legal risks, the liability costs are taken over by At force, at gunpoint by the taxpayer. | |
| And that, of course, says that the market is a complete admission that the market cannot afford to ensure these kinds of activities. | |
| So, I think it's really, really important when you look at something like nuclear power. | |
| Lots of people argue, well, it's safe. | |
| Well, it's not safe. | |
| It's productive. It's not productive. | |
| It's worthwhile. It's not worthwhile. | |
| This is all nonsense. | |
| You can't possibly figure any of that out in the absence of voluntary trade, in the absence of the real tangible material costs accruing to those. | |
| Who are in control of these entities. | |
| That's never going to happen whenever they can shuck whatever burdens they want onto the taxpayers, whenever their liability is capped, whenever their R&D is paid for through the violence of the state and the predations of the military industrial complex. | |
| This is not a free market situation. | |
| This is not a private market situation. | |
| The power grid itself is largely developed by the state. | |
| A much more efficient thing is to have non-utility generators, which are basically just local generators that would be attached to a particular, like a smelting mill or whatever. | |
| Just have local, so that you don't have the problems of transmission and so on. | |
| But the energy system as a whole, like the highway system, like just about anything else, you can throw... | |
| A voluntary rocket hit a status window at is all completely distorted by non-market incentives, by coercive, violent incentives that render any discussion about whether it's worthwhile or not completely moot. | |
| As Joey says, it's moot. | |
| It's a cow's opinion. So I hope that this helps, and thank you so much for those who wrote in to say, sorry, it's been a little while since they did a True News. | |
| I've been doing a series in podcasting on an introduction to ethics, and I'm still working on My new book. | |
| So I hope you're doing very, very well. | |
| Thank you so much for all of your very kind support. | |
| If you would like to throw a few shackles over the firewall, you can go to freedominradio.com forward slash donate. |