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Energy and freedom: A picture is worth 1000 words, and the photo below is worth many thousands of Red Chinese subjects; these are not prisoners, but "free" civilians conscripted for manual labor in a country greatly admired by Jane Fonda. Her views on energy are well known, and we are delighted to hear that Sandra Keifer and Dr Linn Draper, two young and highly competent nuclear engineers, have been sent by the Edison Electric Institute on the trail of Jane and Tom Fonda's antinuclear tour through 50 cities. For understandable reasons, the Fondas have refused to debate them, but the young engineers follow them with rebuttals given in lectures and press conferences.
They may get a little unexpected help from the Fondas themselves, who are beginning to turn off TV audiences: There are more endearing sights than Jane's arteries swelling on her neck as she rants against the producers, while popeyed Tom seems silently to plead with the audience to send forth a maiden, kiss him and turn him into a prince.
We have often pointed to the hidden, but unmistakable, totalitarian element in the ideology of the opponents of abundant energy, and we have collected a few nazi-like quotations by Lovins, Brewer, and Ehrlich when they briefly slipped out of their act of playing freedom-loving saviors.* Hanoi Jane's sympathies in that respect are well known (even now she continues to applaud those who have drowned half a million boat people
¾not even Joan Baez could move her to protest), but the members of this new Herrenvolk have now been joined by a further lover of liberty, Dr John Gofman. No longer content to trample on his Oath of Hippocrates as he stubbornly continues to shut his eyes to the health effects of conventional power sources that could be drastically reduced by nuclear power, he now also reveals himself as a friend and supporter of capitalism, the system that is governed by free choice in a free market. Yet the attempt to strangle nuclear power is being made in the only way that a safer, more reliable and more economical technology can be strangled: by government coercion¾ especially when assisted by massive, centralized media brainwashing. (And when the power runs out with little left but windmills and the other rich man's toys, who will take over to organize things the way they are good for you?)Capitalism is also the system where things prosper because consumers vote for them with their dollars, while other ventures perish because they are not good enough to appeal to them.
The old, pre-1977 Libertarian Review was good enough to make it in a free market; and, we are proud to say, so is this newsletter, which does not take a cent from anybody but its subscribers. It is fitting that Gofman should have found an outlet in the new "Libertarian" Review, which preaches liberty but supports coercion, and which would go under in no time if it had to live by voluntary exchange in a free market. But it doesn't: It lives by handouts from a single donor's charity. Gofman did well to publish both his antinuclear falsehoods and his liberty-loving cant in a journal run by statist welfare bums.
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Vol. 7, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 7 Issue/No.: Vol. 7, No. 3 Date: November 01, 1979 02:52 PM Title: Hairshirts or energy?
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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