Bain, Romney, and Capitalism: The Cure for Socialist Decline

[_Droopy]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/3 ... d-me/print


This excellent essay, but one of America's leading pubic intellectuals and political economists, is required reading for anyone who wishes to discuss the present state of the economy intelligently and wants to understand why Romney, despite his warts, is, at the moment, the only chance we have of averting, at least for a time, a plunge into the dark that it may take generations - if ever- to recover from.

[_Gadianton]

his excellent essay, but one of America's leading pubic intellectuals and political economists,

Quite possibly.

By contrast, government “fair disclosure” securities laws routinize and stultify information release by debouching it through law and PR departments, thus denying public company shareholders any similar access to their companies. The effect is to enforce ignorance on most public stock market investors, reducing them to a level short of real ownership. When a company goes public, ironically, its information immediately goes private, vetted and netted by lawyers and PR counsel until it contains no substance at all beyond quarterly disclosures of enigmatic numbers.

Conglomerates such as Berkshire Hathaway or General Electric, venture capitalists such as Doerr’s Kleiner Perkins, and private equity players such as Romney’s Bain Capital all escape this trap. They can intimately understand the investments they make.They legally join the knowledge of ownership with the power of profits. They are entrepreneurs, commanding the most powerful money in any economy: fully informed finance.

This is a dangerous line of reasoning; he's essentially arguing for a command economy where a handful of elite market players become government officials and make capital allocation decisions for the country because they can do so better than the market can. This is communist propaganda, and as likely the only member of this forum who dogmatically believes in the University of Chicago's Efficient Market Hypothesis, I find it highly offensive.

[_moksha]

Conglomerates such as Berkshire Hathaway or General Electric, venture capitalists such as Doerr’s Kleiner Perkins, and private equity players such as Romney’s Bain Capital all escape this trap. They can intimately understand the investments they make.They legally join the knowledge of ownership with the power of profits. They are entrepreneurs, commanding the most powerful money in any economy: fully informed finance.

This sounds like a very capable syndicate. Would they first announce an IPO for America? What would their own stock options be? Think of the golden parachute they could have in place for themselves when unfettered market forces inevitably triggers its own destruction.

[_Kevin Graham]

Leading intellectual my arse. This is the same idiot who once said "we (Americans) have no poverty problem" He's one of those really old white dudes who will fight to their grave defending supply side economics, no matter what recent history has taught us. Like droopy, they've been defending it so long that they just can't bring themselves to admit they were wrong all this time.

So just let this generation of old-dog Reagan worshipers die off and we'll be much better off as a nation when they're gone.