Do you have to know the secret handshake to get into this club?

Here's Ray Lane, the Chairman of Fisker, the electric car manufacturer that recieved a $529 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy to build its cars in Finland praising the Obama administration's use of tax dollars in private investment and using, wait for it... Solyndra as proof of its success in an interview back in March of 2009.

"Policy - government/private capital cooperation is actually beginning to work."


"It would be silly to think we could start these car companies and build them to full deployment with all the capital required without the help of the government in policy decisions to support U.S. jobs actually manufacturing cars in the United States."

In a sense, Lane is right. It sure would be silly to think Fisker was going to be building cars, their two main models costing $97,000 and $57,400 a piece, without being subsidized because what private investor in their right mind is going to sink his money into that?

Unfortunately, those subsidies are your tax dollars serving to prop up a technology and a business model that is not market-ready. Who is going to buy these cars except super-rich, smug limo-liberals?

And it's terrific they all seem to know each other. As Lane suggests, this crony capitalism thing is pretty damn peachy but unfortunately what winds up happening is that billions and billions of dollars are flushed down a black hole of the politically-connected and cock-a-mamie car companies building a product overseas that no one can afford.

If the technology and business model were market-ready then government subsidies would not be needed, as it stands then, when the government picks winners and losers, they invariably choose the losers.