Archives for October 2011

When Somali’s parliament unanimously agreed two years ago to make Islamic sharia law the basis of their country’s legal system, it was a clear demonstration of democracy in action. That’s a picture of the happy vote. At the same time, it was a serious limitation on individual freedom. So which matters? Democracy or freedom?

Most people mistakenly believe that freedom and democracy are the same things. I’ve talked about this before. The U.S. government is clearly confused about the issue, though. It uses our tax money around the world to support rebellions that will supposedly bring about democracy in more and more places. But if the vast majority of people want something other than freedom — and they want to enact laws to repress other people — why is this a good thing?

The latest example of this is in Libya. The United States spent $1.1 billion over throwing the old dictator (and other western powers spent even more), but there are worrisome signs that the new people aren’t exactly interested in individual liberty. The head of the new Libyan government said over the weekend that sharia law is going to be the foundation of the new country’s law. The same was true under the old regime, but the new regime is signaling that it’s going to go even further in forcing people to behave as their version of good Muslims — or else.

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The story of the Fisker Karma is the perfect picture of why politicians and bureaucrats shouldn’t pretend to be venture capitalists. They don’t know what they’re doing, so they make all the wrong decisions. Why should they care, though? It’s not their money.

You might have heard about the U.S. government giving a $529 million loan guarantee to a car company headed by Henrik Fisker, a well-connected Democratic Party donor. Al Gore is a partner at the venture capital firm that’s backing Fisker in building a luxury electric vehicle.

Well, it turns out that Fisker isn’t building those cars in the United States. He’s building them in Finland, so U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the jobs of Finnish autoworkers. And, yes, the Obama administration signed off on the deal about where to build the cars.

So let’s assume we can ignore the fact that the cars are being built overseas but financed by U.S. taxpayers. At least it will be an environmentally sound car to drive, right? Well, not really.

In a scathing article for Forbes, Warren Meyer explains why this “green” car is a sham. You see, its electric engine has a range of only 32 miles, according to the EPA test procedures. After 32 miles, you switch to its gasoline engine, which gets 20 miles per gallon. You can walk into any car showroom and get better gas mileage than that — with no taxpayer funding subsidy.

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