Plano Texas – Gun Nut Capitol of the World

The USA has, by far, the highest per capita gun ownership in the world. Progressives will tell you that this is what makes America the Murder Capitol of Planet Earth.

But we’re not, and in this devastatingly effective Firewall, Bill Whittle shows why the center of Gun Nut Nation is in fact one of the safest places in the world.

RELATED ARTICLE: Seattle Approves New Tax on Guns, Ammunition

Does ‘Fair Trade’ Help Poor Workers? by Alexander Tabarrok

Does “Fair Trade” help poor workers? Probably not says Don Boudreaux in this excellent, short video from the Everyday Economics series at Marginal Revolution University.

As is well known, however, Don is a rabid, free-market economist with ideological blinders who has been captured by corporate interests.

So let’s ignore what Don says and consider what William MacAskill, author of Doing Good Better (reviewed earlier this week) has to say. No one can fault MacAskill’s charitable bona-fides:

MacAskill’s own pledge is to donate everything he earns above about $35,000 per year, adjusted using standard economic measures for inflation and cost of living, to the organizations that he believes will do the most good. Since his bar is roughly at the UK median income—such that half the population earns more each year, and half the population earns less—he’s certainly not condemning himself to a life of hardship; rather, he is pre-committing to staying roughly in the middle of the national income distribution even as his earnings go up over time.

That said, his pledge means giving away 60 percent of his expected lifetime earnings.

When I ask him the inevitable questions about whether this isn’t rather a lot to sacrifice for one person, MacAskill shrugs modestly and smiles broadly. “Imagine you’re walking down the street and see a building on fire,” he says.

“You run in, kick the door down — smoke billowing — you run in and save a young child. That would be a pretty amazing day in your life: That’s a day that would stay with you forever. Who wouldn’t want to have that experience? But the most effective charities can save a life for $4,000, so many of us are lucky enough that we can save a life every year through our donations. When you’re able to achieve so much at such low cost to yourself…why wouldn’t you do that? The only reason not to is that you’re stuck in the status quo, where giving away so much of your income seems a little bit odd.”

So what are MacAskill’s views on Fair Trade? Why they are the same as Don’s!

When you buy fair-trade, you usually aren’t giving money to the poorest people in the world. Fairtrade standards are difficult to meet, which means that those in the poorest countries typically can’t afford to get Fairtrade certification.

For example, the majority of fair-trade coffee production comes from comparatively rich countries like Mexico and Costa Rica, which are ten times richer than the very poorest countries like Ethiopia. …

In buying Fairtrade products, you’re at best giving very small amounts of money to people in comparatively well-off countries. You’d do considerably more good by buying cheaper goods and donating the money you save to one of the most cost-effective charities.

This post first appeared at Marginal Revolution.

Alexander Tabarrok

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

animals versus human babyThree decades after the ‘Moral Majority’ revolution, after fighting numerous battles for our culture, we can claim victory on, well … hardly anything.

The world is going mad. And it’s not just political madness. It’s madness everywhere.

  • Are we really selling aborted baby body parts? It’s madness.
  • Are we really joining two people of the same sex and calling it marriage? That’s madness, too.
  • Are we really extending the power to get a nuclear bomb to Iran, a nation that has chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel?” That’s complete madness.

Oh, there’s more madness. Much more.

Law-abiding citizens are being turned into lawbreakers for such things as refusing to sell wedding cakes to homosexual couples – while those who were once lawbreakers are now law-abiding citizens, like those who smoke pot in Colorado, Oregon, Alaska and Washington.

It’s still against federal law to smoke weed. Right? But who cares?

And how about this madness: There’s world outrage over a hunter’s killing of a lion in Zimbabwe, but hardly any public outrage over hundreds of Christians being beheaded in the Middle East and Africa by Islamists.

There’s more.

A Florida man was told by a Pinellas County air quality inspector to keep his barbecue smoke in his yard. What? This should make Linda Blair’s head spin all over again.

A New York restaurant owner was fined $5,000 because he used the word “waitress” in an employment ad. An Indian-restaurant owner also was fined $5,000 in New York for trying to hire an Indian waiter.

Maddening, I tell you.

All right, I need to stop or I’ll never get to my point.

I’ve been in the movement of defending America’s traditional, moral and biblical heritage for more than 30 years, first as the editor of Dr. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority Report in 1983, then as president of Christian Action Network since 1990.

The battles back in the day seem small, compared to today’s struggles.

We were fighting abortion and court decisions to kick God and prayer out of the public schools, as well as combatting the relentless chants of feminists, homosexuals and secularists to distort, pervert and destroy the laws of nature and nature’s God.

Three decades later we can claim victory on, well … hardly anything.

Every once in a while we would celebrate a win, such as passing the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman in federal eyes, or the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on homosexuals openly serving in the military, or the Religious Restoration Act, which ensured that religious freedoms were protected from federal overreach.

And we did wage a successful campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts, which was funding some of the most blasphemous, sadomasochistic and sexually gruesome art imaginable.

(My “favorite” was the NEA’s funding of an art project called “Testicle Stretch with the Possibility of a Crushed Face.” It featured a man lying prone on a platform, a rope tied to his testicles that led to a pulley supporting heavy metal weights. If his testicles gave out, his face would theoretically get crushed, giving the art project its brutal and insane name.)

While a couple of these victories remain, the courts, Congress, presidents or federal administrators have gutted most of them.

Now we find ourselves fighting battles that make you wonder whether we are still living in America. It’s as if we’ve been conquered but refuse to admit it.

No army ever came. No outside soldiers ever took over the White House. The American flag still flies. And we still sing the National Anthem at baseball games.

But while the White House lights up in gay rainbow colors in celebration of legalized homosexual marriage, there are no red, white and blue lights on the White House on the fourth of July.

And in Reno, Nev., City Hall replaces the American flag with a gay rainbow flag. Oops, they admitted afterward, they meant to fly the gay flag ALONGSIDE the American flag.

The fact that the head of the DNC can’t explain the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist should tell us a lot.

The president of the United States ignores the laws. The U.S. Supreme Court ignores the Constitution. And Congress, well that’s easy: They ignore the people.

The IRS is using its agents to punish conservatives. If you support anything that America once stood for, you are a hatemonger. If you claim any of your beliefs are grounded in the Bible, you are immediately dismissed as a flat-earth-society lunatic.

Then there’s this particularly harrowing story out of Wisconsin, reported in the National Review:

(Illustration: Roman Genn)

In an article titled, “They came with a battering ram,” the publication exposed how certain Wisconsin officials raided the homes of innocent Americans simply because they publicly supported Gov. Scott Walker’s re-election bid and his “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill.”

Here’s just a small excerpt from this rather frightening story. It’s the story of “Anne” and the police invasion of her home:

Someone was pounding at her front door. It was early in the morning – very early – and it was the kind of heavy pounding that meant someone was either fleeing from – or bringing – trouble. “It was so hard. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought someone was dying outside.”

She ran to the door, opened it, and then chaos. “People came pouring in. For a second I thought it was a home invasion. It was terrifying. They were yelling and running, into every room in the house. One of the men was in my face, yelling at me over and over and over.”

It was indeed a home invasion, but the people who were pouring in were Wisconsin law-enforcement officers. Armed, uniformed police swarmed into the house. Plainclothes investigators cornered her and her newly awakened family. Soon, state officials were seizing the family’s personal property, including each person’s computer and smartphone, filled with the most intimate family information.

When you get a chance, read this remarkable and disturbing article, written by David French. It will send shivers down your spine and make your hair stand on end.

Anne was told by police not to call her lawyer and not to tell anyone about the raid – not her mother, her father nor her closest friends.

She was left with a single question: “Is this America?”

Which brings me to this question: As Iranian citizens chant “Death to America”… are they too late?

RELATED ARTICLE: 405,000 people, 104 bishops sign petition to Pope Francis asking for ‘clarification’ on marriage

The Man Who Sowed the Seeds of Puerto Rico’s Collapse by Lawrence W. Reed

Is there anything more tragically monotonous than a failing welfare state? From ancient Rome to modern Greece, the story is one of the most repetitive in history. It goes like this:

People increasingly decide they’d rather vote for a living than work for one. An academic and intellectual class, dependent on subsidies and anxious to command the economy, advises the people that this is a really good thing. Politicians cater to them with high-sounding rhetoric (“We’ll take care of you”) and low-balling promises (“We can afford it. It won’t cost much. We’ll just take it from the rich”).

Responsibility, self-reliance, and enterprise give way to an entitlement mentality. Power concentrates and corruption ensues. Taxes and debt rise. The government debases the money. Crisis leads to more government, which leads to more crisis. What was always bankrupt morally finally goes bankrupt economically. Goodbye economy, liberty, and often even civilization itself. The barbarians take over. What else is new?

Now it’s Puerto Rico’s turn.

The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a US territory in the northeastern Caribbean. Its governor, Alejandro García Padilla, startled the world back in June when he announced that the island cannot pay back its $72 billion public debt.

“The debt is not payable,” García Padilla said. “There is no other option. I would love to have an easier option. This is not politics; this is math.”

He called the situation a “death spiral.” Suddenly, millions of Americans were learning what a basket case the Puerto Rican economy has become. It is indeed a crisis but one that was, to an embarrassing extent, made right here in America.

It was foisted on Puerto Ricans by one lousy New Dealer in particular. His name was Rexford Guy Tugwell.

More on the egghead Tugwell in a moment, but let me bring everybody up to date on just how bad things are down there. Be sure to read to the end because there’s a silver lining in this very dark cloud.

Puerto Rico has been in a funk for a good while. Its stubbornly high, double-digit unemployment rate is more than twice that of the United States. In fact, it hasn’t been below 9.7 percent in 40 years.

The island’s debt is higher on a per capita basis than that of any US state and four times that of Detroit, which went bankrupt two years ago. Businesses are collapsing. People are fleeing (200,000 have left since 2005). Almost half of the island’s 3.7 million residents earn incomes under the US federal poverty line. Nearly 40 percent of all households get food stamps. Until recently, the retirement age for government school teachers was as low as 47, prompting underfunded pension fund crisis so endemic to welfare states. (The retirement age has lately been raised to at least 55 for current teachers, and 62 for new teachers.)

As Tyler Durden explains at ZeroHedge.com, policies imposed from Washington must shoulder a big part of the blame for this mess: the wizards on the Potomac encouraged debt and deficit spending, priced hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans out of entry-level jobs with a punishing minimum wage, taxed and regulated commerce and investment to a crawl, and showered the island with debilitating welfare. The place would be a showcase of government-induced prosperity except for one sticking point: government.

All of this has been decades in the making, which brings me to the character named Tugwell. I’ve long had a distaste for this pompous meddler. The more I learn about his role as Puerto Rico’s appointed governor (1941–1946), the more I’m ashamed that a US president was dumb enough to put him in charge of anything.

I first heard of Tugwell as an undergraduate economics major at Grove City College in the early 1970s. Fascinated by what my econ prof, Dr. Hans Sennholz, had said in class about America’s 22nd and 24th president, Grover Cleveland, I checked out a biography of him. It carried the imaginative title, GroverCleveland, and included a revealing subtitle, A Biography of the President Whose Uncompromising Honesty and Integrity Failed America in a Time of Crisis.

The author was Rexford Guy Tugwell, widely regarded as the most influential ideologue of economic planning during Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Cleveland terms were largely wasted opportunities, according to Tugwell, because Cleveland would not turn the economy into his personal plaything. If only he had trashed his honesty and integrity, Cleveland could have been the scientist and the rest of us the lab rats.

Tugwell was the Jonathan Gruber of his day. (Recall the smug academic who admitted that deception was employed to fool stupid Americans into supporting Obamacare.) He went straight from academia as a student (the Wharton School at U-Penn, then Columbia) to academia as a professor (University of Washington, American University in Paris, and Columbia University). His intellectual mentors were socialists like Upton Sinclair and Edward Bellamy. Woodrow Wilson’s wartime administration gave him his first real glimpse of the glorious fun of central planning, and he loved it even when it flopped.

In 1932, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt invited Professor Tugwell to join the first White House “brain trust.” These were the whiz kids — the social scientists and experimenters of the administration. Blessed with power and attention, they were ready to “transform” America and “plan” our way out of the Great Depression.

H.L. Mencken was less charitable in his description. He called them “an astonishing rabble of impudent nobodies,” “a gang of half-educated pedagogues, starry-eyed uplifters and other such sorry wizards.” Along with FDR, they “planned” the Depression into the longest slump in American history.

Tugwell loved to set up and run what came to be known as “boondoggles.” He was an architect of the Agricultural Adjustment Act and later director of its Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which taxed agricultural processors and used the revenue to destroy crops and cattle to raise prices. It was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court and ridiculously destructive by clear thinkers.

From its inception in 1935, he directed the Resettlement Administration (RA), which relocated the rural unemployed to new, planned communities in suburbs. Urban authority Jane Jacobs, in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, showed that his program simply displaced people and ruined neighborhoods. The RA was also thrown out as unconstitutional. True to the statist stereotype, Tugwell learned nothing from either experience. “Planning” was his religion and he was going to be its high priest, come hell or high water.

In 1936, Tugwell left Washington and two years later showed up as the first director of the New York City Planning Commission. He tried retroactively to enforce nonconforming land uses with almost no legal or public support. He proved too much an ideologue even for the polarizing Robert Moses, who killed Tugwell’s 50-year, pie-in-the-sky master plan for public housing.

Now let’s get back to Puerto Rico.

By 1941, Rexford Guy Tugwell had behind him a 20-year career of pontificating for big government and managing expensive government flops. Somehow that gave Franklin Roosevelt the idea of naming him governor of Puerto Rico. What Tugwell did for the mainland, he could now do for an island. Maybe this central planning stuff works better if you work small, right?

Nope.

So for five years, Professor Tugwell became Governor Tugwell. One of the first things he did was to create, with the legislature’s approval, the Puerto Rico Planning, Urbanization, and Zoning Board in 1942. If only he had done what John Copperthwaite did later in Hong Kong or what Ludwig Erhard did in postwar Germany or what inspired free marketers have done in freeing their cities, Puerto Rico might today be a beacon of liberty and prosperity. But Tugwell wanted to plan, plan, plan.

Pedro Serra is president of a new organization in Puerto Rico, the Alliance for the Protection of Liberties. He is a businessman from San Juan whose interest in free-market economics led him to work with the 2012 Ron Paul campaign. Looking back on the Tugwell period, he observes,

When President Roosevelt appointed Rexford G. Tugwell governor of Puerto Rico, it was in keeping with the same economic attitude that characterized the New Deal — that the government can solve an economy’s woes. Our government has since taken as an axiom that economic stagnation results from too little government, not too much. If this were the case, then today’s Puerto Rico should be paradise on earth. Instead our economy is depressed, our people jobless, and our government bankrupt.

Climate would seem to have blessed Puerto Rico for agricultural pursuits. Tugwell’s infinite wisdom suggested it should opt for industry instead, so he directed public policy against farming and toward manufacturing. He lobbied for all the aid and welfare from the mainland he could get. He set the tone for decades of a top-down welfare state. Joe Milligan, a colleague of Serra’s, is originally from Rochester, Michigan, and now brings his passion for free markets to San Juan, Puerto Rico, as the director of development for the Alliance for the Protection of Liberties. Here is how Milligan sums it up:

Governor Tugwell’s legacy is alive and apparent on the island. His tenure in office was characterized by central planning, government growth, and expansion of the welfare state. He stamped out the thriving sugar cane and coffee industries in favor of manufacturing. The result is that now we have neither. Today in Puerto Rico our government is the island’s largest employer and half of all residents require government financial assistance to subsist. In this sense Governor Tugwell truly left his mark.

Indeed, for many years after Governor Tugwell left Puerto Rico for academia back in the United States (where failure is celebrated as long as you worship the state and have good intentions), other New Dealers sojourned to the island to offer more of the same.

One of them was Hugh Barton, who had directed the US State Department’s Office of Strategic Services until he was fired for his knowledge of the communist affiliations of some of his top staff. Barton set up shop with the Puerto Rico Planning Board and the Office of Economic Research. If you had a college degree and a penchant for planning the economy of other people, you could get a government job in Puerto Rico in the 1950s and ’60s. Except for a brief retrenchment under one-term Governor Luis Fortuño, Puerto Rico has been run for decades as Tugwell first envisioned it, exacerbated by Washington’s poor policies to boot.

As I promised early in this article, there’s some good news in this bleak course of events. Puerto Rico now has a nascent libertarian movement and an organization devoted to spreading ideas of liberty as an antidote to the Tugwell legacy — the Alianza para la Protección de Libertades (Alliance for the Protection of Liberties) that Pedro Serra and Joe Milligan have launched.

The Alliance seeks to improve the lives of Puerto Ricans by building a new consensus around this proposition: a free society — not a centrally planned, politicized one — is a more prosperous and tolerant society. It works to build public support for smaller government and advise policy makers in choosing the proven path toward prosperity. The Alliance’s programs include developing a college campus lecture circuit, starting a YouTube channel specific to Puerto Rico’s issues, and disseminating compelling literature to legislators.

Never let a crisis go to waste, as the saying goes. Puerto Rico represents a unique opportunity to undo a painful, statist history. I hope readers will want to help.

To support the efforts of the Alliance, email Pedro Serra, the director, at pedro@protecciondelibertades.org.

“The curious task of economics,” Austrian economist F.A. Hayek taught us, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Rexford Guy Tugwell never understood that. With the help of the Alliance for the Protection of Liberties, Puerto Ricans may yet embrace Hayek’s wisdom and thereby shake the curse of Tugwell.


Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

Pamela Geller: Halt Refugee Resettlement Program — Southern Poverty Law Center a “smear machine”

Yesterday, Pamela Geller writing at World Net Daily urged readers to contact their members of Congress to support Rep. Brian Babin’s bill to suspend the UN/US State Department Refugee Resettlement Program until the costs were thoroughly analyzed and the security issues were fully addressed.

We urge you to read her entire commentary here, but bring your attention to what she says about the Southern Poverty Law Center(SPLC) which has been called upon by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to expose this blog and anyone who questions the program as “racists.”   (See my previous post, LOL!, HIAS is obviously using Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for guidance!).

Here is what we said last summer about the HIAS report (Resettlement at Risk: Meeting Emerging Challenges to Refugee Resettlement in Local Communities) siccing the SPLC on us.

And, before I get to what Ms. Geller says, I just saw yesterday that Melanie Nezer of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (author of the report!) is presently chairing the lobbying consortium for the refugee contractors (Refugee Council USA aka RCUSA) and some of their NO Borders friends in Washington.

Melanie Nezer

Melanie Nezer is author of the HIAS report calling on the SPLC to smear us and is presently chairing the refugee resettlement industry’s lobbying arm in Washington.

Longtime readers know that Ms. Nezer is one of the first to call for 15,000 Syrian Muslims a year to be admitted to the US.   Now, RCUSA (and the newly re-branded HIAS) have upped the ante and are behind the drive to admit 65,000 Syrians to your towns and cities by the time Obama leaves office!

We have also learned from inside sources that RCUSA put out an alert to their member resettlement contractors (and mentioning me by name!) to NOT give out any information to any of you calling your local contractor’s offices.  What are they hiding?

Back to World Net Daily and what Pamela Geller says about the SPLC (emphasis is mine):

The only thing more dangerous than the jihadists in our midst are their patrons and benefactors.

WND reported that “the refugee resettlement industry, which includes legions of immigrant rights advocates, lawyers and community organizing groups funded by George Soros, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, among others, churned out a document in 2013 on how to deal with so-called ‘pockets of resistance.’ The document, authored by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, one of the nine government contractors doing resettlement work, advised refugee advocates to research the backgrounds of local people who oppose resettlements and turn them over to the Southern Poverty Law Center for public shaming as ‘racists’ and ‘anti-Muslim’ bigots.”

This is further proof that the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, is nothing more than a smear machine designed to destroy the forces of good. These are the tactics of totalitarians and supremacists. And this is who the media turns to for comment on the work of my colleagues and me. There is not one mainstream media outlet that does not quote the SPLC libels when reporting on my work.

Freedom-loving Americans must understand that this is what every one of us, the individual, is up against: a billion-dollar machine of destruction and hate. Churchill said of Islam: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” And I would add one thing.No stronger retrograde force exists in the America today than the left.

Continue reading here.

Alert!  The most important thing any of you could do right now is to get your member of Congress to co-sponsor the Babin bill.  Who supports Babin’s modest approach, and who doesn’t! is going to tell you all you need to know about your member of Congress!

RELATED ARTICLE: Bob Enos of Willmar, MN speaks, won’t be deterred!

Our Nuclear Energy Options — An Overview by Euan Mearns

With a few exceptions [1], environmental lobbies have tended to oppose nuclear power with a vengeance similar to their opposition to coal and natural gas. In certain quarters [2] this has changed with the promise of abundant, cheap and safe electricity that may be produced using thorium (Th) fuelled molten salt reactors. This guest post by French physicist Hubert Flocard places the status of molten salt reactor technology within the historical context of how the nuclear industry has evolved and examines some of the key challenges facing the development and deployment of this magical and elusive energy source. We have both written the extended summary below based on Hubert’s article that follows on after the summary. Hubert’s impressive bio is at the end of the post.

[1] James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia
[2] Baroness Worthington, Why Thorium Nuclear Power Shouldn’t be Written Off

Extended Summary

The world nuclear industry currently runs on Generation II and Generation III reactor technology. The presently active reactors (whether moderated by pressurised water – PWR – or boiling water – BWR) are said to belong to the GII generation while more modern versions such as the EPR or the AP1000 correspond to GIII. At the beginning of the twenty first century a forum was convened to establish an international collaboration to prepare the next generation of reactor technology (GIV). A number of design options were on the table (see below) among them molten salt reactors.

1) Liquid Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR)
2) Helium Cooled Fast Reactor (HeFR)
3) Liquid Lead Fast Reactor (LFR)
4) Supercritical Water Fast Reactor (SCFR)
5) Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR)
6) Very High Temperature Thermal Reactor (VHTR)

With the exception of the MSFR, that is specifically designed to run on Th fuel, all other technologies will run on U fuel. It is also worth noting that 5 of the 6 designs are fast breeder reactors designed to consume any nuclear waste that they may produce and to extend the life of the global inventory of U and Th that is available to us.

Periodic table from Web Elements.

To appreciate the evolution of reactor technology it is important to understand a little bit about the natural elements on Earth which can be made to fission following the capture of neutrons. They are the actinides located at the bottom of the periodic table. Everyone has heard of uranium (U), thorium (Th) and plutonium (Pu) but are less aware of elements like protactinium (Pa), americium and curium. Some of these less common actinides do exist in nature in minute quantities for brief periods as part of the natural radioactive decay of U to Pb. Others result from the nuclear reactions happening in reactors or at laboratory accelerators.

The isotopes of interest are 235U, 238U and 232Th. Presently, the 235U isotope is by far the most useful because it is the only one which can easily be made to fission, releasing a substantial amount of energy. Thus 235U is described as fissile while 238U and 232Th are described as fertile. Today, 99.3 % of natural U is 238 and only 0.7 % is 235. That is because most of the 235U has already decayed away to stable Pb.

Out of these three isotopes only fissile 235U can be used to initiate a nuclear chain reaction such as those that occur in nuclear reactors or atomic bombs. To achieve a chain reaction it is necessary to enrich the uranium in its 235 isotope. For nuclear power, enrichment is typically about 3.7 %, i.e. a five-fold uplift in concentration as compared to natural uranium. For atomic bombs, the enrichment is much higher, but the same procedure is used, hence concern over civilian nuclear programs in certain countries.

While fissile 235U is required to initiate a chain reaction, the fertile 238U that makes up 96.3 % of the fuel participates also in the energy production since some of it is converted to fissile 239Pu. In this respect all U based reactors breed fissile fuel by tapping into the fertile resource. Breeder reactors are simply designed to breed more fissile fuel than they consume.

Three important points need to be made before continuing. The first is that an MSFR can’t start by using only 232Th. The reactor will first require that either natural 235U or man-made 239Pu be added to initiate the fission chain reaction, since fertile 232Th cannot achieve criticality on its own. The second is that the MSFR is a breeder reactor and environmentalists have in the past opposed breeder technology. In a breeder of any design, fertile 238U or 232Th isotopes are converted to fissile isotopes like 239Pu (U cycle) or 233U (Th cycle). A MSFR will run exclusively on the thorium cycle (i.e. without addition of U5 or Pu9) when it will have bred enough 233U to maintain the chain reaction. It will take time. The “clean” label that some attach to MSFRs derives from the fact that ultimately they are designed to work in a closed cycle as opposed to the present open cycle strategy adopted for most of presently active reactors. In other words, the spent fuel is reprocessed and fissioned again and again until a stable regime is reached in which as many fissile isotopes are created than are destroyed. It has little to do with the fact that 232Th is used as the breeder fuel stock. A uranium cycle fast breeder will also burn its “waste”. And as already mentioned, the idea underlying breeding is to greatly expand the fissionable resource by converting the abundant fertile isotopes (238U as well as 232Th) into the fissile variety.

This leads to a misconception about the quantities of nuclear waste generated by an MSFR. An MSFR burning 232Th fuel will not produce significantly smaller amounts of “waste” than a fast reactor burning 238U. It is just that as already detailed, recycling the breeder isotopes eventually removes them from the environment and stabilises the inventory within the reactor.

A further misconception is that MSFR technology employing 232Th as the fertile proto- fuel will eliminate risks of nuclear proliferation. While it is true that the 232Th cycle does not produce plutonium that may relatively easily be enriched to weapons grade 239Pu, it does produce 233U instead which may also be weaponised. Anyhow a 232Th MSFR started today will require either 235U or 239Pu to initiate the fission reaction. Any country with the appropriate enrichment facilities could divert the use of these isotopes and convert them to weapons grade material if they so wish. Recent history has also shown that one does not really need a reactor to manufacture a bomb. It is enough to have efficient centrifuges.

In conclusion, the technical challenges of MSFR technology need to be considered. The molten fluorine based salts that are envisaged need to work at temperatures in the region 500 to 800˚C and containment vessels and pumps need to be designed which resist erosion, corrosion and the neutron flux from this high temperature salt. An MSFR requires a fuel reprocessing plant and for the Th cycle no such plant has thus far been designed built, tested and approved by safety authorities. Finally, there are well-understood safety protocols for GII and GIII reactors. The radical new approach offered by MSFR technology means that a whole new set of safe design principles needs to be developed.

At the end of the 1960s The Oak Ridge National Laboratory built and ran an experiment MSR-E designed to pave the way for the MSFR technology. The experiment ran for 4 years. Apart from that realisation, MSFR with a thorium-based fuel is a concept yet to leave the drawing board. It is worth pursuing, but the claimed virtues of near inexhaustible resource, enhanced safety, less waste and elimination of weapons proliferation still need to be demonstrated.

Introduction

There are people who believe that, within this century and probably even before 2050, nuclear energy should become a major component in the energy production system, if not for the entire world at least for a large group of countries. They point to some valuable features of nuclear energy (centralized production of electricity and/or heat, reasonably low cost of final energy, a production that can easily be adjusted to society needs, low CO2 emissions, small footprint, etc.). They are also well aware of some of its disadvantages (global bad image in the public inducing significant unpredictable political interventions, limited availability of the natural resource, radiotoxicity of the waste, plant accidents with a related risk of releasing radioactivity, security against terrorist attacks, heavy capital investment only reimbursed over a long period, etc.). They just think that given the energy and climatic problems the world is facing now or is going to face in a not too distant future, the advantages more than balance the liabilities.

However, not all these people have the same nuclear energy on their mind.

For some, the basis of a sensible nuclear program for this century must rely first on the extensive experience accumulated on thermal-fission reactors for which the terms Generation II or Generation III (shortened in GII and GIII) have been coined and second on the already significant experience gained on fast-fission reactors. “Improvement and Optimisation” is their motto while Uranium (U) is their fuel. I belong to this group to which the adjective “conservative” can certainly be attached.

GII and GIII water-cooled and water-moderated reactors are the workhorses of the present nuclear-electricity production. If not stopped for political reasons, they will be performing their job for many more decades. On the other hand, the “fast” reactors cooled with liquid sodium have been tested successfully in many countries and together have already accumulated several hundred years of operation. They have reached a prototype status and even the pre-industrial stage. The main world safety authorities have already a thorough knowledge of the related safety questions. These reactors have also demonstrated their potential on issues such as electricity production, breeding of the fuel (a key to solve a future uranium resource shortage) and waste transmutation.

However, no western world safety authority – and therefore no utility – would consider today that their safety is such that they can be deployed at the industrial level. To simplify, one can say that they have not yet demonstrated the safety level achieved by GIII reactors which is now becoming the standard. Moreover, given the present very low price of natural uranium, they are not economically competitive.

For this reason, in the middle of the first decade of this century, a forum, the “Generation IV International Forum” (GIF), was launched associating the major nuclear industrial nations of the world (with the notable exception of India – a country named “Europe” allows also some nations, such as Germany, to participate in the activities of GIF without having to state explicitly that they are a GIF member). These nations gave themselves the task of defining the next generation of nuclear fission reactors (GIV).

According to GIF, the goals assigned to GIV reactors are the following: 1) Durability which involves a better usage of the natural resource and a minimisation of waste radiotoxicity 2) Economic performance 3) Safety and availability 4) Resistance to nuclear proliferation.

GIF identified six main lines of work suitable for an international cooperation: 1) liquid Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR); 2) Helium cooled Fast Reactor (HeFR); 3) liquid Lead Fast Reactor (LFR); 4) Super Critical water Fast Reactor (SCFR); 5) Molten Salt Fast Reactors (MSFR); 6) Very high temperature thermal reactor (VHTR). Except for MSFR all systems under study envisage uranium as their fuel. The MSFR will use thorium (Th) as a major component of its fuel. Option N°6, VHTR, being a thermal reactor precludes breeding from the start and thus very long term durability as far as the uranium resource is concerned. The rationale for keeping it within GIF is that working at high temperature and thus high Carnot efficiency, such systems will considerably extend the availability of the U resource. It should be added that other thermal-reactor options using uranium fuel and either supercritical water or molten salt as coolants are also being considered on the side-lines of GIF.

As a matter of fact, the selection of the GIV reactor options reflects as much the evaluation of their intrinsic interest as the willingness of at least a fraction of the international expert community to work on them (many more nuclear options do exist). Not too surprisingly, presently, the main effort is focused on the SFR (liquid Sodium Fast Reactor) which appears closer to reach the GIF stated goals than any of its competitors. Of course, since the Fukushima accident, which has set nuclear energy research and industry on the defensive and modified its priorities, activities have considerably slowed down within the GIF.

All the GIF-retained options other than SFR can certainly be called “innovative” (as opposed to my definition of “conservative”). Among them, the one using molten salt and thorium based fuel (MSFR) has gained many supporters in the public, if not necessarily within the community of experts. I believe that some of the enthusiasm for thorium and MSFR is misplaced in view of the present scientific and technical situation – keeping in mind that I am concerned with energy production for the 21st century, not for the centuries beyond. Because the text that follows tries to show that, for me, some supporters wave too simplistic arguments, I would like to make it clear that I think that, MSFR and Thorium fuel is definitely worth both consideration and intensive research.

First, the fact that the MSFR was retained by the international community of experts working within the programme of GIF is a sure sign of its viability. Second, thorium and molten salts have an old history dating almost from the end of the second world-war and some significant advances have been made. The main achievement was realised by the Oakridge National Laboratory (ORNL) with the successful MSR-E experiment (which used uranium fuel). Then, over the seventies, ORNL teams worked on the design of the MSBR, a 1GWe system which intended to have Thorium within its fuel (the B stands for “breeder” and the “e” is here to indicate the expected electric power which is of course lower than the thermal power). However, at the beginning of the eighties, in the US-breeder competition, the MSBR system lost to the SFR. The decision was a complex one but the smaller breeding capacity of the MSBR had a part in it. At that time, a review conducted by the French utility EDF and the French nuclear atomic commission (CEA) analysed the MSBR project and concluded that nothing could be identified which would eliminate the option either from the point of view of chemical or material science, or of nuclear and thermal-hydraulics technology. There were still many difficult open questions but no obvious showstoppers.

Therefore, keeping molten salts and thorium as an open research option for the future makes sense today as it did earlier. There are many good reasons to investigate it that I am not going to enumerate. Here, after this long introduction, I will make a survey of what I believe are the false justifications (myths) and the many unsolved problems which make it doubtful that MSFR and Thorium can play a significant role in the global power generation of this century.

Some myths concerning thorium and molten salt reactors

Myth 1: specificity of an “inexhaustible” Th natural resource

Only elements of the actinide region of the Mendeleyev periodic table can be made to fission following the capture of a neutron. As they fission, in turn, they emit neutrons allowing a chain reaction to be established under appropriate physical and technical conditions. Of all the actinides which existed when the Earth was formed, about 4.65 billion years ago, only two have survived in sizeable quantities: thorium and uranium. Thorium only exists today as the isotope 232 (232Th shortened as Th2). From its very large radioactive half life, one can infer that almost all the Th2 which existed at the birth of the Earth is still around us. Natural uranium contains two isotopes 238U (U8) and 235U (U5). While half of the original U8 is still there, only 1/100th of the original U5 has survived, the rest has disappeared via natural radioactive decay processes ending at a stable Pb isotope. This is reflected in the present natural uranium composition: 99.3 % U8 and 0.7 % U5. When nuclear engineers or opponents of nuclear energy talk about a limited uranium resource, what they have in mind is U5, not natural uranium (or U8) which is a hundred times more abundant.

For nuclear engineers, Th2 and U8 which have an even number of neutrons belong to the same category: the “fertile” isotopes while U5 is said to be “fissile”. To be started, any reactor needs a fissile element. As a matter of fact, for the vast majority of reactors in activity the concentration of U5 within natural U is not sufficient, hence the need for enrichment typically up to 3.7 %. Note that a few billion years ago, the ratio U5/U8 was larger than today, so that natural reactors could operate spontaneously as happened for instance at the Oklo site in Gabon. In today’s reactors, the presence of fertile U8 within the fuel pins is also important for energy production. Indeed, a small fraction of this U8 swallows one neutron and is transmuted (in two steps) into the isotope 239 of plutonium (Pu9) which because it is also fissile can contribute to the chain reaction which ultimately produces energy. In other words some small amount of “breeding” is already occurring in thermal reactors.

Th2 is the nuclear equivalent of U8 (233U or U3 plays for Th2 the role that Pu9 plays for U8). Because there is no fissile isotope present within natural thorium, in order to start a thorium-fuelled reactor one must add first some fissile material. Since it can’t be U3 which does not exist on Earth it could be U5 (from the same natural uranium which provides the fuel of today reactors) or Pu9 (coming for instance from the burnt fuel of standard reactors) or other fissile materials to be found for instance in the radioactive waste of standard reactors. In other words Th2, like U8, only acquires the status of an energy resource when breeding is envisaged. The only available natural resource to initiate breeding is U5.

In some presentations to the public, “breeding” appears to perform a sort of miracle: “producing more fuel than was present within the input”. It should rather be described as “producing more fissile material than was present within the input”. It is the energy potential of a fertile isotope (Th2 or U8), a kind of “fission-proto-fuel”, which is then exploited following an appropriate transmutation into either U3 or Pu9.

The U8 resource appears almost as inexhaustible as the Th2 resource (a factor 2, or 4 less does not really modify the issue, given the geology-related uncertainties). In addition, over the years, the U8 resource has acquired a significant advantage: it does not have to be mined anymore. It is already on the shelves in large quantities at least in countries which have a nuclear enrichment industry and its commercial value is zero, if not negative. As a matter of fact U8 is sometimes considered as a sort of “waste” extracted from natural uranium to obtain the U5-enriched fuel for standard reactors. Indeed for each U8 nucleus still kept in the fuel of a GII or GIII reactor, about four U8 nuclei have been removed from natural uranium and stored away. As an illustration, presently, the stock of U8 stored in France corresponds to about one thousand year of this country’s present energy production in fast reactors. Note that the former French rare-earth chemical industry has also left on the shelf a quantity of Th2 amounting to about 100 years of nuclear energy production in a MSFR. The “nuclear-fertile” resource, Th2 as well as U8, is plentiful.

In fact if there is to be a resource shortage preventing a future GIV breeder-reactor generation to replace the reactors of GII and GIII generations, it will certainly not be one of fertile isotopes (Th2 or U8) but rather a shortage of fissile elements and more specifically one of Pu9. It also appears that only those countries which have exploited PWR or BWR reactors for a long time will have produced enough Pu9 within the burnt fuel of their GII and GIII reactors to be in position to start reactors of the GIV generation at a significant level.
Myth 2: the waste of Th fuelled reactor waste is less dangerous.

There are few points to keep in mind when one discusses nuclear waste:

1) How to define nuclear waste is not simple when breeding and recycling is involved (always the case with Th). Indeed, the only unambiguous waste produced by a nuclear reactor consists of the fission products. All elements, Th, U, Pu or other isotopes generally classified as “minor actinides” present in the burnt-fuel when it is discharged from the reactor vessel still have potentially an energetic value if they can be made to fission. It is thus a matter of technical, safety and political decisions to consider whether they belong in the waste or whether they are a fuel to be recycled in the next stage of the operation of the nuclear system.

2) To illustrate this last sentence we can, for instance, consider how most countries today define the nuclear waste resulting from the operation of their GII or GIII reactors. These countries have opted for the “open-cycle” or “once-through” strategy: there is no reprocessing; the fuel pins and their casing discharged from the reactor are considered to be a waste and destined to an ultimate repository. A typical composition of the burnt fuel of a GII reactor is: fission products 5 %, fissile isotopes 1.5 %, and fertile isotopes 93.5 %. Thus 95 % of what is today defined as a nuclear waste has, “fissionwise”, an energetic potential. One can also note that the ratio of the mass fissile output (U5 plus Pu9) over that of the mass fissile input (only U5) is close to 40 %. The choice has thus been made to send to the waste a significant amount of fissile isotopes which on the other hand are known to be necessary to start any reactor and also cost energy to produce via enrichment of natural uranium. In a sense, the corresponding waste underground repository can also be caricatured as a “man-made plutonium mine”.

3) In a comparison of the thorium-cycle versus the uranium-cycle, the radiotoxicity of the fission fragment waste which dominates the total radiotoxicity for the first centuries can be set aside. It is roughly the same for both cycles. Thus any difference between the two cycles will only be visible after a few centuries have passed, say 500 years.

4) How to define the danger associated with a waste which has been sent to a permanent underground storage is also a matter of discussion. One can consider the total radiotoxicity of what is being stored. This is the radiotoxicity that, for instance, would be encountered by somebody, not too expert in questions of geology, searching for oil at the wrong place, who drills right into the underground nuclear waste repository. After a few centuries, this radiotoxicity is dominated by the actinide content of the waste. Since it is not the same for the two cycles, we shall return to that point later. On the other hand one may consider the small radiotoxicity – often smaller than natural radiotoxicity – which after many millenniums escapes to the surface through the geological barrier (the repository is typically few hundred meters below the Earth surface). Since the mobility of actinides in the ground is very small, the very-long-term escaping radiotoxicity will mostly correspond to some long lived isotopes of very mobile fission-fragment elements (for instance Zr or I). Here again there won’t be much difference between the thorium and uranium cycle. For this reason, from then on, I will only discuss the radiotoxicity associated with the actinide elements, namely that which would be met by somebody who breaks into an underground nuclear waste storage.

5) Full recycling means that all the actinides coming out at one stage are reinserted into the fuel of the next stage. Thus the large radiotoxicity within the burnt fuel does not vanish; it is just made to move around circularly from the reactors to the separation cells to the fuel production factories and back to the reactors within the diverse nuclear-industry components. On the other hand, if the recycling process (whether for the U-cycle or Th-cycle) is perfect there won’t be any radiotoxic waste stream other than that of the fission products.

6) After each pass through the reactor, recycling implies that a chemical separation is performed on the burnt fuel. Because no chemical process is perfect, the stream of actinides effectively going out to the waste and determining its middle-to-long term radiotoxicity (short term is governed by fission fragments) depends on the efficiency of the chemical separation techniques. For the uranium-cycle, efficiencies above 99.9 % have been demonstrated. The corresponding figures for the thorium cycle are not known.

7) Full recycling is also not currently envisaged for the U-Pu SFR technology. It is generally considered that only plutonium will be recycled while minor actinides such as americium (Am) and most certainly curium (Cm) will be sent to the waste. This strategy along with the efficiency of the chemical separation determines the time evolution of the radiotoxicity of the waste stream of SFR reactors. It is several orders of magnitude below that of the burnt-fuel stream of today’s reactors. I will come to that point later because I believe it gives a misleading image of the benefit of recycling as concerns waste reduction (see 10 below).

8) Assuming that the not-yet-known chemical separation efficiencies for the thorium cycle are the same as those already demonstrated for the uranium cycle, it can be shown that the radiotoxicity of the actinide waste stream of a MSFR reactor when it is working in its “asymptotic” regime, that is a system relying exclusively on the Th2-U3 cycle, is lower by at least an order of magnitude than that of a SFR reactor working exclusively within the U8-Pu9 cycle and sending americium and curium to the waste. However, this good point should also be taken with a grain of salt.

9) Indeed, while following a long period of production with GII and GIII reactors, one can envision extracting from their stored burnt fuel all the Pu9 necessary to start immediately an “asymptotic” SFR reactor. This is not possible for a MSFR. The U3 resource does not exist. No “asymptotic” MSFR reactor can be started today. The first MSFR reactors will have to use either U5 or Pu9 – or some other isotopes of higher elements – to be started. Via transmutation they will therefore produce the same undesirable elements (Am and Cu) and thus the same kind of waste as SFRs. It will take almost a century before a MSFR breeds enough U3 to avoid tapping into the U5 and Pu9 resource and thus become “asymptotic”.

10) Finally, many presentations on the actinide waste generated by fast reactors implicitly assume that mankind will rely on them forever. In other words, these presentations only consider the radiotoxicity of the waste stream which leaves the chemical reprocessing factories while electricity is still being produced by reactors. In such a case, the radiotoxic gain over the present situation (the nuclear burnt fuel is disposed without reprocessing into the long term repository as it leaves the reactor) is indeed large (several orders of magnitude). On the other hand, if one day, fusion becomes an economically viable option or if there is a major breakthrough on the energy storage question rescuing renewable intermittent energies, humans may decide to stop producing electricity via nuclear fission. At that point, all the radiotoxic isotopes present within the system – reactors, chemical and fuel fabrication factories – become a waste that must be added to the stream of the earlier electricity production period. If one assumes for instance that it will take 200 years of operation of breeder reactors before one reaches this “end of the game” situation, one finds that it is the addition of this “in-cycle” radiotoxicity which mostly determines the radiotoxic evolution of the waste during the following millenniums. Then, the radiotoxicity of the total MSFR waste will only be slightly lower than that of a SFR. There will also still be a small gain over the present strategy in which only GII and GIII reactors are used and their burnt-fuel is disposed without reprocessing. Typically we are talking here of decreases by one order of magnitude if everything in the complicated recycling scheme works optimally.

11) It is doubtful that such a small gain can suppress the opposition to the usage of nuclear energy of somebody whose main concern is the very-long-term radiotoxicity of the waste. It will also not enable societies to find a stable and long-term safe waste management solution if only for containing the radiotoxicity of the fission fragments. One can say that the nuclear waste issue – and the need for underground repositories – is not going to be removed by SFRs or by MSFRs. At most, it will be alleviated, which certainly is a plus. In addition, one may note that at least, it will be up to the countries which have benefitted from the associated electricity production to solve their own nuclear waste problem. This appears more ethically defendable than the fossil-fuel-powered electricity production in which the CO2 emitted by the beneficiaries of the electricity is graciously “offered” to the rest of the world.

12) To conclude this section on nuclear waste, one should not forget that volume, chemical properties and short-term heat production also play an important role when it comes to designing a repository.

Myth 3: The thorium cycle will eliminate the nuclear proliferation issue

A bomb needs fissile material. Neither U8 nor Th2 are good materials for making bombs. It is certainly the case that no bomb has been produced using U3 since there is no U3 available. Whether that will still be the case when U3 becomes plentiful and is routinely handled in reprocessing units is certainly not clear to me. Discussions about larger or smaller critical masses are essentially irrelevant here. In addition, as was discussed above, for a very long time a MSFR will be using U5 or Pu9, which means that the possibility of diverting these isotopes for a dangerous purpose will remain.

I believe one should not count on the physics (Th vs U) or the technology (MSFR vs SFR) to stop humans from doing foolish things. Non-proliferation has certainly technical aspects which require nuclear expertise to be present and heard in international discussions but, for me, proliferation is mostly a political issue.

Problems still to be solved problems for a molten salt thorium fuelled reactor

Here, I list some of the problems still faced by the MSFR technology.

Problem 1: Design and Material science.

The associated questions concern the salt, the vessel and the heat exchanger.

  • In a MSFR, the salt acts both as a heat carrier and nuclear fuel carrier. It also has some moderating (i.e. slowing down neutrons) effect which precludes for instance its usage for breeding with the uranium cycle. The salt must stay stable within a wide range of rather high temperatures (typically from 500°C to 800°C). A family of fluorine based salts is presently being considered. These salts should resist the high neutron fluxes within the vessels (their chemical structure must remain intact and their elements should not suffer transmutation). They should dissolve the actinides of the fuel at the required concentrations and keep them dissolved all along the circuits of the reactor (vessel, heat exchanger and connecting pipes) in variable temperature and fluid velocity conditions so as not to create unwanted deposits of nuclear material.
  • The material for the vessel and the heat exchanger (Ni-based alloys are being considered) should resist both mechanical and chemical corrosion by the salts on the inside surface and oxygen corrosion at high temperature on the external surface.
  • Salt is not as good a heat carrier as liquid metals. The design of heat exchangers capable of rapidly (typically less than 10s) extracting heat while resisting the mechanical corrosion by a fast moving salt is still a challenge.
  • The demonstration that valves and pumps capable of working reliably for many years with such salts under the planned temperature and fluid velocity conditions is not yet done.
  • The most harmful fission fragments that can poison the reactor must be eliminated on-line via the helium bubbling technique. This has not yet been demonstrated in situations close to those that will exist in a future MSFR. The material for the vessel and the heat exchanger (Ni-based alloys are being considered) should resist both mechanical and chemical corrosion by the salts on the inside surface and oxygen corrosion at high temperature on the external surface.

Each of these points should reach a status such as to receive an agreement from the safety authorities.

Problem 2: Chemistry of the combined uranium and thorium cycles

A thorium-fuelled molten-salt reactor has to be coupled to a highly efficient chemical unit to reprocess the fuel and the salt. The element-separation efficiencies should be as high as those which have already been reached at units designed for reprocessing within the uranium cycle. Presently, the scientific knowledge and technological knowhow needed to build a working prototype of a Th-cycle reprocessing unit with such performances does not exist.

Two reasons for this situation can be advanced. First the amount of man-year work on the thorium cycle is minuscule compared to that already spent for the uranium cycle. Second, the chemistry is different. First, some oxidation-potential properties of Th are not as favourable as those of U. Second, since U3 is not available and because the U5 resource is limited, one generally presents the first MSFRs as “nuclear waste burners” which will use (and destroy) the plutonium of the waste of GII and GIII reactors (some even mention higher actinides) as their initiating fissile isotope. This makes the chemistry more complicated since it must be able to handle simultaneously elements belonging to the Th and U cycles.

Problem 3: Design of a global strategy for safety

The general philosophy underlying the safety scheme of today’s reactors was elaborated over many years. It relies on the so-called “in depth defence” which requires the existence within the reactor of three barriers which have to be breached before some radiotoxic material is released to the outside world. Typically, in GII and GIII reactors, they correspond in succession to the metallic envelope of the fuel pins, the boundary of the primary circuit (vessel, primary heat exchanger) and finally the reactor building.

Even when reprocessing is performed (the situation in France) so that other sets of safety regulations have to be defined (approved and enforced) for the chemical separation unit, and the fuel-pin fabrication factory, this does not affect the general safety programme for the reactor itself. Indeed, there is still a clear physical separation between these three components of the global nuclear system. This means that the safety scheme as it exists today for GII and GIII reactors and is understood jointly by the designers of reactors, the electric utilities operators and the members of safety authorities can also be applied to SFRs. These three groups of experts may certainly argue over the implementation of the various safety items and their performance levels but at least they agree on the goals and they share a common safety language.

Nothing of the sort exists for the MSFR in which at least one barrier is a priori missing (the metallic envelope of the fuel) and which combines on the same site the reactor and the chemical reprocessing unit whose activities directly affect each other. It is my guess that no significant work has been done to define a safety scheme for molten salt reactors since the MSBR was abandoned in the first half of the eighties. What competence on this subject existed at that time is probably either obsolete today in view of the steady reinforcement of nuclear safety or simply lost. This competence has to be rebuilt, something which today appears rather problematic.

Conclusion

In my opinion, Thorium and molten salt reactors technologies belong definitely in the domain of research. They certainly have a potential which deserves scientific and technical investigation. On the other hand, given the present situation of the nuclear energy research institutes of the western world and the general decline in their enrolment of high-quality well-trained young engineers, it is improbable that much work will be invested into such an innovative, far-reaching but also risky option. Therefore if nuclear energy is to provide a significant contribution to the world energy mix of the 21st century, it is doubtful that thorium and molten salt technologies will be ready in time to take part.

END NOTES:

[1] The adjective « thermal » refers here to the average kinetic energy of neutrons as they impact the heavy nuclei in the nuclear fuel. They are close to 1/40 eV (or 273°K or 0°C). On the contrary, in a “fast” reactor, the fission-neutrons are not slowed down by water so that their kinetic energy remains in an MeV range that is a factor of 107 above that in a thermal reactor. Without getting into nuclear physics details, it suffices to say here that only fast neutrons allow efficient breeding at least for the uranium cycle. The situation is different for the thorium cycle which can breed over a wide range of neutron kinetic energies, albeit less efficiently that in a fast U-Pu reactor.

Short Bio for Hubert Flocard
hubert.flocard@gmail.com

A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (St Cloud) Hubert Flocard is a retired director of research at the French basic science institute CNRS. He worked mostly in the theory of Fermi liquids with a special emphasis on nuclear physics. He has taught at the French Ecole Polytechnique and at the Paris University at Orsay. He was for several years a visiting fellow of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and he spent a year as visiting professor at the theory department of MIT (Cambridge). He has worked as an editor for the journals Physical Review C and Review of Modern Physics (APS, USA) and Reports on Progress in Physics (IoP, UK). He has chaired the nuclear physics scientific committee INTC at CERN (Switzerland). When the French parliament asked CNRS to get involved in research on civilian nuclear energy, he was charged to set up and to manage the corresponding CNRS interdisciplinary programme. He still acts as a referee to evaluate research projects submitted to Euratom.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Energy Matters website. The featured image is of the inner working of a Molten Salt Fast Reactor.

Arizona: Criticize Common Core and Dept. of Ed. Official Might Call You a “F***tard”

In September 2013, the Arizona Daily Star noted that then-Governor Jan Brewer “ordered state agencies to stop using the term ‘Common Core’ when referring to the new education standards, in response to hostility from critics over what they see as a federal intrusion.”

The Daily Star article continues:

In an executive order, the governor said she was “reaffirming Arizona’s right to set education policy.” Her order spells out “no standards or curriculum shall be imposed on Arizona by the federal government.”

But it concedes the standards adopted by the state Board of Education in 2010 already are being implemented. And Brewer herself referred to them as Common Core in her State of the State speech and her budget request to the Legislature.

Press aide Andrew Wilder said the order changes nothing except the name, which going forward will be “Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards.’’

Brewer’s decision was arguably a sleight-o-name intended to fool the Arizona public into accepting Common Core.

Still, there were critics in Arizona, vocal critics like teacher Brad McQueen.

If anyone insists that Common Core is not politically loaded, send that person this June 2014 story out of Arizona:

By Brad McQueen

Ever wonder why more public classroom teachers don’t speak out against the Common Core and their Superintendents of Instruction and Governors who support it?

I am a Tucson teacher who wrote my first anti-Common Core op-ed this past February in the Arizona Daily Independent and it was subsequently reprinted by other online news sources. I followed up the publication of the op-ed with an interview on a local radio station. This was the reaction of the Arizona Department of Education bureaucrats in emails recently obtained by the Arizona Daily Independent:

_____________________________________

EMAIL #1:

From: Hrabluk, Kathy (Associate Superintendent)
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 2:37 PM
Subject: AZCCRS (Common Core) criticism

Fyi regarding a teacher named Brad McQueen. He is on a roll criticizing AZCCRS (Common Core)… he also has an article in the Capitol Times (2-27- 14) stating many misconceptions that has been floating around. Just thought you might want to check your list of teacher teams (from which teachers are selected to work on tests at the Dept of Education). He is one unhappy camper.

_____________________________________

EMAIL #2

From: Hunting, Irene (Deputy Associate Superintendent Assessments)
Subject: RE: AZCCRS (Common Core) criticism

Thank you. We have made a note in his record.

Irene Hunting

________________________________________

Irene Hunting, Deputy Associate Superintendent of Assessments, instantly “notes” my file to make sure I am never called again to work on tests at the AZ Department of Education. I have worked on our state’s standardized test, the AIMS test, and other assessments for the last five years for several weeks over each summer break. Not only do I enjoy the challenging work and I enjoy contributing toward creating our students’ tests, but the summer work has always supplemented my teacher salary. But when you speak out against the cult of Common Core, they are punitive. Sarah Gardner, AZ Director of PARCC Assessments, joins the conversation and also makes sure that I will never work on tests again at the AZ Department of Education or anywhere else for that matter.

________________________________________

EMAIL #3

From: Gardner, Sarah <Sarah.Gardner@azed.gov
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2014 1:46 PM
To: Stephanie Snyder (PARCC,Inc.)
Subject: RE: question

Given that Brad McQueen gave a negative statement to the press about Common Core and assessment, you may want to remove him from the invitation list…

This was such a surprise for Arizona as Brad has been on many committees, both for our state assessment as well as involved with Common Core and formative assessment based on CC (Common Core) for our state

Let’s make sure he is not going to Denver later this month. Please remove Brad McQueen from the list.

Sarah Gardner, MAEd-C/T
Director of PARCC and Innovative Assessments
ADE – Assessment Section (602) 542-7856________________________________________

Angela Escobar then sends the following email, on taxpayer-paid time, after discovering that I had gone public with my anti-Common Core views during a radio interview:

________________________________________

EMAIL #4
From: Escobar, Angela (AZ Dept of Education)
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2014 2:44 PM
Subject:Brad McQueen is on the radio

What a f*cktard.

Angela

Lovely. and that as coming from a department of education official.

Notice that the education officials still refer to the supposed “Arizona” standards as what they really are: Common Core. And Common Core can have no criticism because that makes CC marketing more complicated.

For the rest of Brad’s story, click here.

In March 2015, the Associated Press (AP) reported that legislation concerning the repeal of Common Core was defeated in the Arizona Senate 16-13 after making it through the Arizona House.

Arizona still has Common Core, and at least the 2015 legislation was willing to call it by its true name.

According to the AP, current Arizona Governor Doug Ducey doesn’t think repeal is “necessary” because he has asked the board of education for a standards review.

If Arizona’s standards review entails altering Common Core, then it is arguably no longer Common Core.

If.

I wonder if Escobar will be available to encourage those participating in Arizona’s Common Core standards review to keep CC exactly as is under threat of being called f***tards. Perhaps not. In July 2014, Escobar had her hand slapped for her slurring McQueen.

Common Core lesson learned?

Shaking my head….

Hillary Clinton’s Ideological Vortex of Power and Planning by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Just trust her. Truly, just trust her: to know precisely how much energy we ought to use, where it should come from, how it should be generated, how we should get from here to there, and the effects that her plan will have on the global — the global! — climate, not just in the near term but decades or a century from now.

If you do this, you will have embraced “science,” “reality,” “truth,” and “innovation,” and, also, “our children.” If you don’t go along, you not only reject all those good things; you are probably also a “denier,” the catch-all epithet for anyone doubtful that the brilliance of Hillary Clinton and her czars know better than the rest of humanity how to manage their energy needs into the future.

Hillary’s campaign seems designed to prove that F.A. Hayek was a prophet.

That brilliant economist spent 50 years explaining, in book after book, that the greatest danger humanity faced, now and always, was a presumption on the part of intellectuals, politicians, and bureaucrats that they know better than the emergent and evolving wisdom of social forces.

This presumption might seem like science but it is really pretense. Civilization arises from, is protected by, and advances through the dispersed knowledge of billions of individual decision makers and the institutions that arise from them.

Hayek called the issue he was investigating the knowledge problem. Society needs to know how to use scarce resources, how to navigate a world of uncertainty, how to form rules that turn struggle into peace. It is a problem solved through freedom alone. No ruler, no scientist, no intellectual can substitute for the evolving process of decentralized decision making and trial and error.

The message is bad news for people like Hillary, who is supposed to embody the ideology called “liberalism” in America. Yet it is anything but liberal. It seems to know only one way forward: more top-down control. That’s a tough sell in times when everything good so obviously comes from anything but government, and, meanwhile, governments are responsible for every failing sector from health to education to foreign wars.

But here’s the problem. People like Hillary Clinton are stuck in an ideological vortex with no way out. Government planning is their thing, and they refuse to recognize its failures. So they press on and on, even to the point of preposterous implausibility, such as the claim that government can know everything that is necessary to know in order to plan the entire energy sector with the aim of managing the climate of the world.

Economist Donald Boudreaux puts matters this way: “why should someone who cannot ensure the proper use of a single private server be trusted with the colossal power necessary to design and to oversee the remaking of a trillion-plus dollar sector of the U.S. economy (a sector, by the way, in which this person has zero experience)?”

With this presumption comes the inevitable hypocrisy.

After unveiling her plan to ration energy use and plaster the country with solar panels, Ms. Clinton boarded a private jet that uses more fuel in one flight hour than I use in a year. “The aircraft, a Dassault model Falcon 900B, burns 347 gallons of fuel per hour,” wrote the muckraker who did a public service in exposing this. “The Trump-esque transportation costs $5,850 per hour to rent, according to the website of Executive Fliteways, the company that owns it.”

Notice how rarely it is mentioned that the US military, with hundreds of bases in over a hundred countries, is the worst single polluter on the planet. If we really believe in human-caused climate change, this might be a good place to start cutting back. But no, there’s not a word about this in any of Hillary’s plans. Government gets to do what it must do. The rest of us are supposed to pay the price, bicycling to work and powering our homes with sunshine and windmills.

When I first read about her energy plan, my response was: Why would any self-interested politician make the need for reduced living standards a centerpiece of her campaign? After all, her speech was made in a setting piled high with bicycles (oddly reminiscent of Mao’s China), while demanding a precise path forward for energy and everything that uses it (oddly reminiscent of Lenin’s first speech after he took control of Russian economic life).

As it turns out, people aren’t that interested. Sure, most people tell pollsters that they favor renewable energy to stop climate change. You have to say that or else risk being denounced as a denier. On the other hand, it seems like very few people really care enough to forgo the benefits of modern life, which is probably what will save civilization itself from plans like hers. Note that days after release, her pompous video only had only 54K views — pathetic given her celebrity and how much money her campaign is spending, but encouraging that nobody seems to put much stock in her plan for our future.

It’s extraordinary how quickly one branch of the political class has leapt from the delicate and ever-changing science of climate monitoring to the absolute certainty that extreme and extremely specific application of government force is the way to deal with it. Writes Max Borders: “The sacralization of climate is being used as a great loophole in the rule of law, an apology for bad science (and even worse economics), and an excuse to do anything and everything to have and keep power.”

The last point is critical. Everything done in the name of public policy in our lifetimes has become a handful of dust, yielding little more than unpayable debts and unworkable programs, and leaving in its wake an apparatus of compulsion and control that robs society of its inherent genius.

What to do? Give up? That’s not an option for these people. Instead, they find a new frontier for their schemes, a new rationale to sustain a failed model of social and economic organization.

I can think of no better words of rebuke but the closing of Hayek’s Nobel speech in 1974:

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.

He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will.

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

Yes, it surely ought to.


Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

Texas Congressman Introduces Bill to Suspend Refugee Resettlement Program

Rep. Brian Babin is a first term Congressman from East Texas.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) has introduced the Resettlement Accountability National Security Act (H.R. 3314) which seeks to suspend refugee resettlement to America until economic costs are analyzed and national security concerns are put to rest.

I’ve been following this issue for eight years and this is the first time I have seen anyone in Congress (other than recent concerns about Syrian refugees) take a single step to begin to scrutinize the entire program.

Now, let’s see if Rep. Trey Gowdy will give the bill a hearing in his all-important Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security!

Just a reminder, Babin’s home state of Texas is presently the number one state targeted by the UN/US State Department for refugee distribution.

Here is Babin’s press release late today (hat tip: Rosemary):

Washington, DC – U.S. Rep. Brian Babin (TX-36) yesterday introduced the Resettlement Accountability National Security Act (H.R. 3314), which places an immediate suspension on allowing immigrants into the United States under the refugee resettlement program, until the Government Accountability Office (GAO) completes a thorough examination of its costs on federal, state and local governments. According to the U.S. refugee admissions database, nearly 500,000 new immigrants have come to the U.S. under the resettlement program since President Obama first took office – with the state of Texas and its taxpayers being asked to take in more than any other state.

“It is extremely unsettling that the Obama Administration would continue to expand the U.S. resettlement program at such an irresponsible pace in light of our economic and national security challenges,” said Rep. Babin. “While this program may be warranted in certain situations, it is continuing at an unchecked pace. For the past decade the U.S. has been admitting roughly 70,000 new refugees a year, with little understanding of the economic and social costs on our communities.

“Our legislation institutes a common sense pause in the program so that we can better understand the long-term and short-term costs that this program has on local governments, states and U.S. taxpayers. It also gives us an opportunity to examine potential national security issues related to entry and resettlement, particularly as federal law enforcement officials are increasingly concerned about home-grown terrorists.”

This is a very big deal!  Please! Thank Rep. Babin (202-225-1555) and put pressure on Gowdy’s subcommittee to give the bill a hearing!  It is shameful that the program has not in all of its 35-year history been subject to a thorough review.  Call Gowdy at 202-225-6030 even if you have done it before!

Consider sending your horror stories to Rep. Babin!

An afterthought Babin is going to get pounded by the supposedly religious resettlement contractors especially ones with tentacles in his district.  If you live in his district and are supportive of his efforts, please let him know.  Those ‘Christian’ contractors can be pretty mean!

Senator Rand Paul Introduces ‘Read the Bills Act’

AKRON, Ohio /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — “Congress has to read the bills, if they want to claim they represent us,” declares Jim Babka, President of DownsizeDC.org, Inc. “The ‘Read the Bills Act’ restores fiduciary duty in Congress.”

Under the Read the Bills Act (RTBA, S. 1571), members of Congress would have to sign an affidavit indicating they’ve read the bill or heard it read to them before voting “For” the bill. Courts would be prohibited from enforcing laws that didn’t meet this requirement.

“You can’t claim ignorance of the law as a defense in court,” Babka continues. “So there shouldn’t be any excuse for politicians to pass huge bills they haven’t read.”

Senator Paul has been featuring this issue as one of his priorities while on the campaign trail.  The Senator himself observes that, “Too often in Congress, legislation is shoved through without hearings, amendments or debate. Elected officials are rarely given an adequate amount of time to read the bills in full, and unlike Rep.Nancy Pelosi, I believe we must read the bills before passing them into law.”

RTBA also requires the bill to be posted online for seven days before the final vote. This, Senator Paul notes, will give Americans “sufficient time to read and give input to Members of Congress as they consider legislation.”

This simple, “transpartisan” act is hard for members of Congress to accept. But Americans love it. Grover Norquist, in his book, Leave Us Alone, called the bill an essential reform for transparency, applauding the fact that it prohibits sneaking-in last minute deals.

Babka commends Senator Paul. “He’s not only re-introduced this bill, which would be a law that would protect individuals, but he’s also put forth a Read the Bill rule, which would require the Senate to have a waiting period of bill publication for the vote. Truly, he’s committed to this issue.”

To help attract more co-sponsors to Senator Paul’s bill, DownsizeDC.org offers a free tool for constituents to deliver letters directly to their Representative and two Senators. Here’s the link: https://secure.downsizedc.org/etp/rtba/

DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

http://www.DownsizeDC.org

RELATED ARTICLES: 

50 Years of Dysfunction: The Failures of Medicare and Medicaid

How Rich Corporate Elites Are Lobbying Lawmakers to Crush Marriage Advocates

First the Media Ignored Planned Parenthood Videos, Now a Court Wants to Censor Them. Here’s Why It Won’t Work

Born 225 Years Ago, Tocqueville’s Predictions Were Spot On

Government Ruins the Dishwasher (Again) by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The regulatory assault on the dishwasher dates back at least a decade. For the most part, industry has gone along, perhaps grudgingly but also with a confidence that dishwashers would survive. Surely government rules wouldn’t finally make them useless.

But the latest regulatory push by the Department of Energy might have finally gone too far. The DoE says that loads of dishes can’t use more than 3.1 gallons. This amounts to a further intensification of “green” policies that are really just strategies to wreck the consumer experience.

The agency estimated that this would “save” 240 billion gallons of water over three decades. It would reduce energy consumption by 12 percent. It would save consumers $2 billion in utility bills.

But as with all such estimates, these projections have three critical problems.

First, saving money and resources is not always an absolute blessing if you have to give up the service for which the resources are used. Giving up indoor plumbing would certainly save water, just as banning the light bulb would save electricity. The purpose of resources is to use them to make our lives better.

Second, the price system is a far better guide to rational resource use than bureaucratic diktat. If the supply of water or electricity contracts, prices go up and consumers can make their own choices about how to respond. This is true with one proviso: There has to be a functioning market. This is not always true with public utilities.

Third, the bureaucrats rarely consider the possibility that people will respond to rationing by using resources in a different way. A low-flow toilet causes people to flush two and three times, a low-flow showerhead prompts people to take longer showers, and so on, with the end result of even more resource use.

What does breaking the dishwasher accomplish? It drives us back to filling sinks or just running water over dishes for 10 minutes until they are all clean, resulting in vastly more water use.

The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, which has quietly gone along with this nonsense all these years, has finally said no.

“At some point, they’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone that just doesn’t have any blood left in it,” said Rob McAver, the lead lobbyist.

The Association demonstrated to the regulators that the new standards do not clean the dishes. They further pointed out that this can only lead to more hand washing. The DoE now says it is revisiting the new standards to find a better solution.

All of this is rather preposterous, since dishwashers are already performing at a far lower level than they did decades ago. Even when I was growing up, they were getting better, not worse. You could put dirty dishes in, even with stuck-on egg and noodles, and they would come out perfectly clean.

I started noticing the change about five years ago. It was like one day to the next that the dishes started coming out with a gross-me-out film on the glasses. I thought it was my machine. So I bought a new one. The new one was even worse, and it broken within a year. Little by little, I started hand washing dishes first, just to make sure they are clean.

It turns out that this was happening all over the country. NPR actually discerned this trend and did a story about it. The actual source of the problem was not the machine or the user, but something that everyone had taken for granted for generations: the soap itself.

The issue here is phosphorous. The role of phosphorus in soap is critically important. It is not a cleaning agent itself but a natural chemical that unsticks the soap from fabrics and surfaces generally. You can easily see how this works by adding phosphorus to a sink full of suds. It attacks the soap and causes it to bundle up in tighter and heavier units, taking oil and dirt with it and pulling it down the drain. It is the thing that extracts the soap, making sure that it leaves surfaces.

Painters know that they absolutely must use phosphorous to prepare surfaces for painting. If they do not, they will be painting on a dirty, oily surface. This is why the only phosphorus you can now find at the hardware store is in the paint department (sold as Trisodium Phosphate). Otherwise, it is gone from all detergents that you use on clothes and dishes, which is a major reason why both fabrics and dishes are no longer as clean as they once were.

Why the war on phosphorous? It is also a fertilizer. When too much of it is dumped into rivers and lakes, algae growth takes over and kills off fish. The bulk of this comes from large-scale industrial farms in specific locations around the country. Regulators, however, took on the easy target of domestic soaps, and manufacturers faced pressure to remove it from their soaps.

Now it is impossible to get laundry or dish soap with phosphorous as part of the mix. If you want clean, you have to physically add your own by purchasing trisodium phosphate in the paint department and adding it to the mixture by hand.

Welcome to regulated America, where once fabulous consumer inventions like refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, and dishwashers have been reduced to a barely functioning state. The reasons are always the same: 1) phosphorous-free detergent, 2) a fetish with saving water, 3) weaker motors that use less electricity, 4) more tepid water due to low default settings on hot water heaters, and 5) reduced water pressure in general.

Put it all together and you have an array of products that no longer function in ways that make our lives better. There is an element of dystopia about this, especially given that these household appliances were first invented and widely deployed in postwar America. This was the country where women, in particular, first started to enjoy the “freedom from drudgery.” It was machines as much as ideology that began to enable women to cultivate professional lives outside the home.

No, we are not going to be forced back to washboards by the river anytime soon. But suddenly, the prospect of having to hand wash our dishes does indeed seem real. If the regulators really do get their way, functioning dishwashers could become like high-flow toilets: contraband to be snuck across borders and sold at a high black market prices.

It seems that the regulators can’t think of much to do these days besides ruining things we love.


Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Digital Development at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

Trump improves immigration score at NumbersUSA

Trump still trails Santorum and Walker.

There has been much controversy surrounding recent statements by Presidential candidate Donald Trump regarding his position on a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens, but it seems his team has worked to clarify recent statesments over the last day or so.  Here is Roy Beck at NumbersUSA last evening on Trump’s score (now a C +) at their all-important ‘Worker-Protection Immigration Grade Cards.’

This is Beck’s clarification:

After a lot of criticism over the weekend of his recent remarks about letting the “good” illegal aliens stay, Donald Trump has gone on national media to clarify his remarks about amnesty — a bit. There is still a lot of confusion about the details of his stance, and it is likely that he has not yet thought about those policy details.

On the basis of the new details he has provided in the last two days, NumbersUSA is changing his amnesty rating from HARMFUL to MIXED on our Worker-Protection Immigration Grade Cards. (See all ratings and grades for 21 Presidential Hopefuls at: www. NumbersUSA.com/2016

With that change and the ratings he has on the other nine immigration categories, Trump has raised his overall grade to a C+, which again puts him in the No. 3 spot among all 21 Presidential Hopefuls of both Parties.

(Rick Santorum earns an A grade, and Scott Walker earns a B-minus as the only Hopefuls whose policy stances on 10 immigration issues are more positive toward American workers and their families.)

Many thanks to all of you Trump supporters who sent messages in one way or another to the Trump campaign to improve what he was saying about legalizing illegal aliens. This is what supporters of every candidate ought to be doing. We provide contact information on each candidate. Just click on the photos on http://www.NumbersUSA.com/2016.

Again, the scorecard is here.

Diversity Visa Lottery is an abomination!

The last issue on the card is “End Visa Lottery.”   Of all the candidates, only former Senator Rick Santorum understands enough to flat out oppose it.

Think about it, we admit on average 50,000 LEGAL immigrants a year through a lottery system!  An [expletive deleted] lottery!

I explained the lottery (also sometimes referred to as the ‘green card lottery’) in some detail here back in May when it was learned that there is some fear of terrorism rearing its head in the mostly Muslim Uzbek community in New York.  A large number of those Uzbeks won the lottery.

Demonstrating that some in Washington know that the lottery is an abomination, ten years ago the House voted to kill it, but the Senate never acted:

In December 2005, the United States House of Representatives voted 273–148 to add an amendment to the border enforcement bill H.R. 4437 abolishing the DV. Opponents of the lottery said it was susceptible to fraud and was a way for terrorists to enter the country. The Senate never passed the bill.

The express purpose of Senator Ted Kennedy’s lottery is to add diversity to America!  Every Republican candidate should call NumbersUSA right now and say they flat-out oppose the lottery! 

Legal immigrants to America should be chosen based on what they would contribute to America, not because we don’t have enough of their particular ethnicity here!

P.S. Note to Beck! Reform (or stop altogether!) Refugee Resettlement Program should be a new scorecard category.

Related update!  Please read this important article by Mickey Kaus (mentions Trump) but most importantly informs us that Kaus is re-thinking his earlier view of legal immigration and beginning to see Ann Coulter’s important point—all immigration must be curtailed at least for now.

Economists Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Dr. Arthur B. Laffer, Steve Moore Launch the Committee to Unleash Prosperity

NEW YORK /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Economists Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Dr. Arthur B. Laffer, and Steve Moore have launched the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. This group aims to end America’s growth slump and restore faith in the American Dream.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity was founded to combat America’s “growth gap” by promoting an agenda that will revitalize America’s economy. In the past decade and a half, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, U.S. economic growth has diminished to roughly 2% annually—a significant decrease from its Post-World War II average of 3.5%.

This subpar growth rate has come at tremendous cost to American families, household incomes, employment opportunities, investment, and poverty levels. Above all, the lack of growth has led some to doubt the attainability of the American Dream and to wonder if our current economic climate is the new norm.

The Committee to Unleash Prosperity is working to change this. In pursuit of rapid growth, the Committee promotes the following six economic principles:

  1. A broad-based, low rate, flat tax
  2. Limited government spending
  3. Decreased regulation
  4. Sound money
  5. Free trade
  6. Rule of constitutional law

Thus far, the Committee has hosted several Presidential candidates to discuss their economic platforms including Governor Scott Walker, Governor Bobby Jindal, Governor John Kasich, Governor Mike Huckabee, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Carly Fiorina. The Committee has invited other Republican and Democrat presidential candidates to attend future events.

Today, the Committee will host a luncheon with former Texas Governor Rick Perry to discuss how to restore economic growth and opportunity for all Americans. The event is sponsored by Margo and John Catsimatidis.

Prominent thought leaders have joined the four founders in their mission:

David L. Bahnsen
Richard Breeden
Travis H. Brown
Andrea Catsimatidis
John Catsimatidis, Sr.
John Catsimatidis, Jr.
Margo Catsimatidis
Veronique de Rugy
Steve Elieff
Dr. Edwin Feulner, Jr.
Harold Hamm
Kevin A. Hassett
Roger Hertog
James Kemp
Lewis E. Lehrman
Adele Malpass
David Malpass
Betsy McCaughey
Dan Mitchell
Georgette Mosbacher
David Mullins
Mary Ann Mullins
Deroy Murdock
Liz Peek
Alexandra V. Preate
Andrew F. Puzder
Avik Roy
Rex Sinquefield
David Webb

The Executive Director is political strategist Jon Decker. The Committee to Unleash Prosperity looks forward to promoting its optimistic vision for America’s economic future.

STEVE FORBES

Steve Forbes is Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media. In both 1996 and 2000, Mr. Forbes campaigned vigorously for the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Key to his platform were a flat tax, medical savings accounts, a new Social Security system for working Americans, parental choice of schools for their children, term limits, and a strong national defense.

LARRY KUDLOW

Larry Kudlow is CNBC’s Senior Contributor. He was previously host of CNBC’s primetime “The Kudlow Report.” He is also the host of “The Larry Kudlow Show,” which broadcasts each Saturday from 10:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. on WABC Radio and is syndicated nationally by Cumulus Media.  Kudlow is the author of “American Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity,” published by Forbes in January 1998. He served on the transition committees for Reagan-Bush in 1980 and Bush-Cheney in 2000. During President Reagan’s first term, Kudlow was the associate director for economics and planning, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President, where he was engaged in the development of the administration’s economic and budget policy.  He was formerly chief economist and senior managing director of Bear Stearns & Company. Kudlow started his professional career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where he worked in open-market operations and bank supervision. He is co-authoring a forthcoming book about President John F. Kennedy’s tax cuts.

DR. ARTHUR B. LAFFER

Dr. Arthur B. Laffer is founder and chairman of Laffer Associates and was a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board for both of his two terms. Dr. Laffer also advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on fiscal policy in the U.K. during the 1980s. He has been a faculty member at the University of Chicago, University of Southern California, and Pepperdine University. Dr. Laffer received a B.A. in economics from Yale University in 1963. He received a MBA and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1965 and 1972 respectively.

STEVE MOORE

Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Project for Economic Growth, at The Heritage Foundation.  Moore, who also was a member of The Journal’s editorial board, returned to Heritage in January 2014—about 25 years after his tenure as the leading conservative think tank’s Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs from 1984 to 1987. He was a senior economist under Dick Armey’s Joint Economic Committee, and he played a large role in the creation of the FairTax proposal.

MARGO AND JOHN CATSIMATIDIS

John Catsimatidis is the Chairman and CEO of the Red Apple Group, a Fortune 500 company with annual revenues in excess of $5 billion. The Red Apple Group is a diverse holding company comprised of an energy sector which includes oil refineries, bio-diesel plants, and extensive New York area storage facilities with a deep draft tanker facility on the eastern shore of Long Island.  The Red Group also carries a real estate portfolio valued at nearly $1 billion. In addition, Red Apple Group has an aviation component which leases corporate aircrafts as well as a major supermarket chain in New York City.  Margo Catsimatidis is the President of MCV Advertising and is heavily involved with philanthropy. One of Mrs. Catsimatidis’ primary charities is the Hellenic Times Scholarship Fund which has provided college scholarships for the past 25 years. Margo and John are parents of Andrea and John Jr., both graduates of NYU and now work alongside their parents in all facets of their businesses.  Margo and John are firm believers in giving back to the community and they have a large portfolio of charitable interests which have a common theme of assisting young people.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Path to Repeal Obamacare With Just 51 Votes

VIDEO: Liberty Still Has a Fighting Chance by Lawrence W. Reed

This speech was delivered at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Nevada, on July 8, 2015.

Over a nine-month period beginning in 1831, a 26-year-old Frenchman visited nearly every corner of what were then the 24 states of the American Republic. He traveled from New England to the upper Midwest to the Gulf Coast in the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic. Then he wrote a great book full of amazing insights. It made its appearance 180 years ago, in 1835. Perhaps nobody before or since has defined the essence of America better than he did; but then, no other nation in history offered an essence so profoundly exceptional.

Less than half a century after the ratification of the Constitution, America was still an infant nation, but Alexis de Tocqueville sensed the stirrings of greatness. He praised our entrepreneurial drive and initiative, our self-reliance and personal independence, and our vibrant civil society institutions and voluntary associations. He felt that our ideals would eventually lead us to lead the world. He believed that America had placed two sacred principles — freedom and equality — on a higher pedestal than any previous civilization had. They were, he said, our most defining characteristics, the sources of our strength. But he also feared that we would carry one to an extreme that would undermine the other. Milton Friedman was echoing Tocqueville when he said in the 20th century, “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

Tocqueville’s appreciation of freedom knew few bounds. Here is perhaps his most eloquent endorsement of it:

Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.

He masterfully described how the growth of government could smother our freedoms:

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Tocqueville’s view of equality is more nuanced. He had no issue with the ideal of equality before the law or even equality of opportunity. He hated slavery and any unwarranted discrimination. He agreed with the words of our Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But he had no illusions that individuals were thereafter equal in their energies, their talents, their ambitions, their intellect or their character. He was afraid that our egalitarian impulses might someday get the better of us.

“I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights,” he wrote. “Liberty is my foremost passion. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”

This issue is so critical to our freedoms and our future that I want to dwell on it for a moment.

Remember this: Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free.

Put another way, in terms of economics, think of it this way: Free people will earn different incomes. Where people have the same income, they cannot be free.

Economic equality in a free society is a snare and a delusion that redistributionists envision. But free people are different people, not programmable robots, so it should not come as a surprise that they earn different incomes. Our talents and abilities are not identical. We don’t all work as hard. And even if we all were magically made equal in wealth tonight, we’d be unequal in the morning because some of us would spend our newfound wealth, and some of us would save it.

To produce even a rough measure of economic equality, governments must issue the following orders and back them up with punishment and prisons:Don’t excel or work harder than the next guy, don’t come up with any new ideas, don’t take any risks, and don’t do anything different from what you did yesterday.

In other words, don’t be human.

Economic inequality, when it derives from the voluntary interaction of creative individuals and not from political power or connections, testifies to the fact that people are being themselves, putting their unique skills to work in ways that are fulfilling to themselves and of value to others. As Tocqueville himself might say, Vive la différence!

People obsessed with economic equality do strange things. They become envious of others. They covet. They divide society into two groups: villains and victims. They spend far more time dragging somebody down than they do pulling anybody up. They’re not fun to be around.

And if they make it to a legislature, they can do real harm. Then they not only call the cops — they are the cops.

If economic inequality is an ailment, punishing effort and success is no cure in any event. Coercive, envy-based measures that aim to redistribute wealth prompt the smart or politically well-connected “haves” to seek refuge in havens here or abroad, while the hapless “have-nots” bear the full brunt of economic decline. A more productive expenditure of time would be to work to erase the mass of intrusive government that ensures that the “have-nots” are also the “cannots.”

Another superb alternative to coercive redistribution would be to work on our character — each of us, one at a time — so that we’re not only good enough for liberty, but good enough to earn a living instead of voting for one.

This economic-equality thing is not compassionate. When it’s just an idea, it’s bunk. When it’s public policy, it’s compulsory insanity. To those who can’t understand how different or unequal we are as individuals, I say, “Get over it!”

Tocqueville warned that this unhealthy obsession with economic equality, combined with an erosion in the respect for liberty and property, would produce what we today would call the welfare state. Let me offer you a description of the welfare state. Somebody once said that it got its name because in it, the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. Just picture people in a giant circle with each having one hand in the next person’s pocket.

The whole notion of the welfare state rests on this really dumb proposition: since people are not decent and compassionate enough to assist their deserving fellows in distress, we must expect them to elect politicians who are more decent and compassionate than they are. How ridiculous! Those politicians then take money from us under threat of imprisonment, launder it through an expensive bureaucracy, and spend what’s left not to actually solve the problem but to manage it into perpetuity for endless dependency, demagoguery, and political gain. And then the advocates of the welfare state compliment themselves for possessing a monopoly on compassion and totally ignore the destructive results of their own handiwork.

So here we are now, decades into the very egalitarian welfare state Tocqueville warned would be the death of American exceptionalism. It threatens to make us like all the other forgettable welfare states that languish in history’s dustbins, Greece included. Should we just assume it’s inevitable and go along for the ride? Or should we muster the character that built a nation and that Tocqueville identified as quintessentially American?

If you’re pessimistic, then you’re no longer part of the solution. You’ve become part of the problem. What chance does liberty have if its supposed friends desert it in its hour of need or speak ill of its prospects?

Ask yourselves, What good purpose could a defeatist attitude possibly promote? Will it make me work harder for the causes I know are right? Is there anything about liberty that an election or events in Congress disprove? If I exude a pessimistic demeanor, will it help attract newcomers to the ideas I believe in? Is this the first time in history that believers in liberty have lost some battles? If we simply throw in the towel, will that enhance the prospects for future victories? Do we turn back just because the hill we have to climb got a little steeper?

This is not the time to abandon time-honored principles. I can’t speak for you, but someday, I want to go to my reward and be able to look back and say, “I never gave up. I never became part of the problem I tried to solve. I never gave the other side the luxury of winning anything without a rigorous, intellectual contest. I never missed an opportunity to do my best for what I believed in, and it never mattered what the odds or the obstacles were. I did my part.”

Remember that we stand on the shoulders of many people who came before us and who persevered through far darker times. The American patriots who shed their blood and suffered through unspeakable hardships as they took on the world’s most powerful nation in 1776 are certainly among them. But I am also thinking of the brave men and women behind the Iron Curtain who resisted the greatest tyranny of the modern age and won. I think of those like Hayek and Mises who kept the flame of liberty flickering in the 1940s. I think of the heroes like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson who fought to end slavery and literally changed the conscience and character of Britain in the face of the most daunting of disadvantages. And I think of the Scots who, 456 years before the Declaration of Independence, put their lives on the line to repel English invaders with these thrilling words: “It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

As I think about what some of those great men and women faced, the obstacles before us today seem rather puny.

This is a moment when our true character, the stuff we’re really made of, will show itself. If we retreat, that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these challenging times build our character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication, we will look back on this occasion someday with pride at how we handled it. Have you called a friend yet today to explain to him or her why liberty should be a top priority?

Nobody ever promised that liberty would be easy to attain or simple to keep. The world has always been full of greedy thieves and thugs, narcissistic power seekers, snake-oil charlatans, unprincipled ne’er-do-wells, and arrogant busybodies. No true friend of liberty should just roll over and play dead for any of them.

Take an inventory every day of what you’re doing for liberty. Get more involved in the fight. There are plenty of things you can do. If your state isn’t a right-to-work state, work to make it so. Support people and organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education that are teaching young people about the importance of liberty and character. Get behind the Compact for America and its plan for a balanced federal budget and an end to reckless spending and debt. Work for school choice in your state to help break the government monopoly on education. And be the very best example for liberty and character that you can possibly be in everything you do.

Whatever you do, don’t give up no matter what. Remember these words of the great US Supreme Court justice George Sutherland: “The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.”

Can Tocqueville’s American exceptionalism be restored? Can it last? You bet it can. The American Dream still lives, in the hearts of those who love liberty and refuse to meekly surrender it. So let’s wipe the frowns off our faces and get to work. Our future, our children’s future — liberty’s future — all depend on us.


Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

Minnesota: Refugee Resettlement a ‘Form of Slavery’?

In an interesting coincidence, yesterday we posted a guest column from ‘Idaho Patriot’ about refugee resettlement as modern-day slavery and then right on the heels of that we see the same theme echoed in Minnesota—where the ‘Pockets of Resistance’ are getting organized and expanding.

Here is an article at the Morrison County Record about a concerned private citizen who is taking his own personal time to research and speak about what he is learning.

Article entitled: Speaker in Little Falls: Illegal immigrant, refugee resettlement done as a form of slavery.

Ron-Branstner

Ron Brantsner

Ron Brantsner, with the former Minutemen Civil Defense volunteer border watch group, was in Little Falls July 23. He was invited to the area to speak about how corporations and volunteer agencies bring illegal immigrants and refugees to Minnesota as a form of “slavery,” to do jobs Americans wouldn’t do, for low wages.

Brantsner, formerly of Minnesota, now has a residence in California.

Invited by “a gentleman out of Little Falls,” Brantsner said, “I don’t contact anybody. People reach out to me. I don’t go solicit this, I don’t get paid for this, I don’t belong to any organizations.

“When I get invited, I’m a normal everyday citizen just livin’ the dream,” he said.

Brantsner told the group that with funding from the federal government, the volunteer agencies or “Volags” as he called them, had targeted Minnesota because of the generous welfare benefits in the state. The targeted areas were those where poultry processing plants, and meat packing plants were located, he said.

Brantsner said once illegal immigrants and refugees move into a community, its Social Services, health care and educational resources are overwhelmed, with counties and taxpayers footing the tax burden.

He went on to discuss the role of large foundation grants.  The foundations are connected with BIG MEAT working to colonize communities for their own selfish cheap labor needs.

Read it all.

Great business model isn’t it?  State and local taxpayers help pick up the tab when salaries are too low to support large immigrant families.

This post is archived in our new ‘Pockets of Resistance’ category so that others of you might know, and get inspiration, about what your fellow Americans are doing to save America!  There are many more volunteers like Ron Brantsner trying to get the word out on their own dime.  Meanwhile the pro-Open Borders side is well-funded thanks to big business, the Chamber of Commerce and Leftwing foundations.