David McElroy

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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So far, the end of the world is looking just like any other day of my life. But surely Harold Camping is going to come through for us with the apocalypse he promised us for today. Right?

Well, no. He’s not, because Camping has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s just another arrogant man who believes he’s smart enough to speak for God. History is littered with them, even if their excuses for being wrong change with the times.

If you’re an atheist or an adherent of another religion, you might think Camping’s failed prediction says something about Christianity, since Camping claims to be a Christian. In reality, though, it says the man can’t read the book he claims to believe. When Jesus spoke of the end of the world, He had this to say in Mark 13:32-37:

“But concerning that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake. Therefore stay awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or in the morning—lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Stay awake.”

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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.)

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