There was a great interview of Dambisa Moyo in the NY Times magazine this past Sunday.  The crux of the interview was that Ms. Moyo advocates that the way for African nations and other evolving countries to get out of their economic malaise is to foster and promote entrepreneurship.  She goes even further to say that most of the handouts and aid that is dumped in these countries actually does more harm than good.  In the end, she promotes lending groups like Kiva.

What makes this most interesting is that this comes in the wake of the U.S. government and its “economic stimulus” package.  President Obama went to a joint session of Congress last night, but he never really advocated that we find our way out of this mess through entrepreneurship.  Instead, government spending will lead the charge.  This is in such stark contrast to what Ms. Moyo preaches that it makes you scratch your head.

If entrepreneurship has made America great and is the key to helping developing African countries, why is our government not doing more things to get out of the way of America’s start-ups?

Instead of a bailout from Congress, here is what we should be offering:

• Eliminate all payroll taxes for 1 year
• Provide $100 billion to banks to provide loans, but the loans have to be given to businesses with less than 10 employees
• Offer a $5 billion dollar prize to the first company/group that can produce and sell 5,000 cars that get over 100 MPG

How many jobs could be created from that type of stimulus?

Many of you who know me, know that I am a big TR (Theodore Roosevelt) fan.

I was rereading a book TR wrote about his adventures in Africa, and I was struck by a line he wrote, “The darker the night the bolder the lion.” This seemed to be an amazingly fitting line for our current economic climate.   We are in the midst of one of the worst economic climates in any of our lifetimes.  And many are predicting that it only will get worse.  My sense is that it is time to be bold.  Strategies in this climate need to be grand, yet economical at the same time (the definition of bold in its purest business form).   They require decisive action and doing things more quickly and nimbly than others in the marketplace can.

So, as you gear up to attack 2009, ask yourself, “What kind of lion am I?”  Are you one that will roar out of a terrible economy and command a market segment, or are you a follower left to get scraps, barely able to survive?  The answer is completely up to you.

Government can do one of two things to business, it can expedite its growth by creating an environment with low taxes and minimal regulation or it can make taxes, permits, and regulation that are nothing more than roadblocks to entrepreneurs.  On a vacation to Kauai, Hawaii, this simple fact was demonstrated. Kauai is a beautiful island known as the “Garden Island”, and it is luscious, green and magnificent.

On Kauai, there is the Kauai Cigar Company, which was born out of the Blair Estate Coffee Farm.  According to the marketing brochure for the cigar company, the company is a place where “diversification and expansion are part of the intrinsic spirit.” You can read this to mean that they are an entrepreneurial group of people that run the company/farm.

But what really hit home was a message that you find later in the same brochure: “While it took nearly 6 months to obtain a federal permit to manufacture and sell cigars, the reporting, bi-monthly federal taxes, and whopping nearly 40% Hawaii wholesale tax made it financially impossible to hand make cigars in Hawaii.”  So what did these entrepreneurs do? They found a company in Nicaragua to roll and manufacture the cigars.  While a testament to the fact that the world is flat and that entrepreneurs will not be stopped by government silliness, it also demonstrates the backward thinking of many governments.  Instead of having jobs in the U.S./Hawaii for this work, the Kauai Cigar Company ships their cured tobacco from Hawaii to Nicaragua and then back to the U.S.  While we can congratulate them for their creativity and ability to make their business work, we have to shake our head at the stupidiy of the Hawaiian and U.S. governments.

We are in the midst of one of the great economic meltdowns and revolutions of our lifetime.  The financial markets crisis that has seen Lehman Brothers go bankrupt, AIG on the brink of collapse, and JP Morgan Chase sold at yard sale prices has sent reverberations throughout the business world.  The dollar is weakening on a daily basis, and the credit crunch is hitting main street.  This is an economic ice age.

And like the ice age that brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs and precipitated the rise of the mammal to the top of the food chain (note: this is the WV scientific take on dinosaur extinction), we believe the same thing will happen in this meltdown.  Small start-ups are going to be like the furry rodents that scurried around the jungles of the Jurassic Age.   As the large T-Rexs and other raptors (think large financial behemoths) fail to adopt and adapt to the change in climate, small, more agile creatures do find a way through.  The greatness of start-ups is that they can find holes in the cracks of an economy.  And like the early mammals, they also will evolve and grow into the dominant economic force.

So, as the bad news continues to grow and reverberate on Wall Street, think about the ways you can evolve and adapt.  Start-ups are just the small, furry, agile creatures of this ice age.