Opening a business? It’s easier to do in Rwanda than in U.S. today

By David McElroy · October 21, 2011

Let’s say you’re looking to start a new business, but you don’t want to deal with a lot of bureaucratic red tape. Where’s the best place to start it? The most interesting thing about the list of best places to start a business today is who’s not close to the top of the list: the United States.

The World Bank’s annual Doing Business report ranks countries according to how friendly they are to business. Of the 11 categories ranked, the United States is in the top 10 in only four of them. (In the category of paying taxes, the United States is the No. 72 country in the world.)

So where’s the easiest place in the world to start a business? The report says it’s New Zealand, followed by Australia, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. None of those are terribly surprising to anyone who keeps up with world business, but the No. 8 country is Rwanda. Yes, the country that’s synonymous in our minds with mass killings in its recent past is one of the few African countries getting its economic act together in this particular way. (Here’s a slideshow of the top countries in that category.)

So does this really matter? The United States is the richest country in the world. We have a huge lead over everybody else. Right? Well, not as much as you might think. We got rich by making it easy to start businesses and generate wealth, which created opportunities for millions and millions of people. The things we’re doing today are making it less desirable to operate businesses here. Some people are looking at the regulatory environment and deciding to quit. Some of you might remember a story I had a couple of months ago about a coal mine operator named Ronnie Bryant who decided to quit.

Once a country loses its edge, I don’t think it ever gets it back. I certainly haven’t seen any examples of it. When the Roman Empire was on top, nobody realized it was slipping and would collapse. When Spain was the most powerful country in the world, it was hard to see it losing its position on top. More recently, Britain was the unquestioned leader of the world until about a hundred years ago. History is littered with such examples. They all lost their leadership positions and never got them back.

The rules by which you govern society matter. If we set up rules that are free and consistent, we will achieve amazing results. When we take power away from people and put barriers in their way, we will start losing wealth and power. The United States once took the first approach. Today, we’re taking the second approach — and we’re slowing paying a price for it.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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