Response to: Off And Out With Mitt Romney
So we have a new, completely biased, partisan blog from Paul Krugman, who I believe is now a full-time spokesman for the Democratic party.
The point of this is to discredit Mitt Romney as a candidate for president because he is (1) unqualified and (2) an evil bad guy.
Krugman doesn’t trouble himself with numbers, graphs, or facts. He doesn’t need to. This is just a crowd-pleaser opinion piece. So let’s look at his opinion.
Now, the truth is even under the best of circumstances, the case for electing a businessman as president would be very weak. A country is not a company – does any company sell more than 80 percent of what it makes to its own workers, the way America does? — and competitive success in business bears no particular relationship to the principles of macroeconomic policy. So even if Romney were a true captain of industry, a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, this wouldn’t be a strong qualification.
The case for electing a businessman as president would be very weak? Who should we elect? A kids’ party magician? The mechanisms of government - overwhelmingly - apply to business. Who is better suited to understand the real-world ramifications of legislation? I dare you to name one occupation. (And don’t say “lawyer” - though, to be fair, Romney is that, too.)
And, no, not many companies sell more than 80 percent of what they make to their own workers. What a weird way to distinguish between government and companies. We know they are different. Does any company have 15 trillion dollars in debt? Does any company have the ability to issue bonds to itself and count them as assets? Has any company operated at a loss for 65 consecutive years?
“Competitive success in business bears no particular relationship to the principles of macroeconomic policy.” Really? So, demonstrating success through efficient production on (or under) budget would have no ramifications for macroeconomic policy? What esoteric wisdom did Barack Obama learn as a community organizer that could be better applied to macroeconomic policy?
So even if Romney were a true captain of industry, a latter-day Andrew Carnegie, this wouldn’t be a strong qualification.
Okay. Well, I guess we’ll also just forget he was governor of a state.
Moving on.
Krugman then ramps up the demagoguery (I’m truly wondering when he’ll announce his run for office) by accusing Romney of KILLING JOBS!! Krugman also scolds Romney for subcontracting jobs within the United States.
…it’s simply not true, as the Romney people would have you believe, that domestic outsourcing is entirely innocuous. On the contrary, it’s often a way to replace well-paid employees who receive decent health and retirement benefits with low-wage, low-benefit employees at subcontracting firms. That is, it’s still about redistribution from middle-class Americans to a small minority at the top.
To me, this paragraph discredits Krugman as an economist.
See, sometimes, boys and girls, certain industries go into decline. That’s the way life works. We aren’t frozen in time using all the same things year after year. Let’s take telephones. Lots of companies used to make landline phones. Well, as the precursors to the iPhone (which socialists, especially, seem to love) started eating away at landline market share, those landline phone factories had to scale things back. Bain Capital is the type of company that helps with that process.
Let’s now assume, as we realistically can in this case, that the only way to save Phone Company X was to restructure with domestic outsourcing. While demagogues like Krugman and Obama like to point to all the “OUTSOURCING” and “LAID OFF WORKERS,” the reality is the company was saved. If the restructuring hadn’t happened, then Phone Company X would have gone out of business and everyone at the company would have lost their jobs. Being mad at Bain for making an inefficient company smaller is like getting mad at the doctor for amputating a gangrene arm.
Or put it a different way: Romney wasn’t so much a captain of industry as a captain of deindustrialization, making big profits for his firm (and himself) by helping to dismantle the implicit social contract that used to make America a middle-class society.
I’m sure people at the typewriter factory were, at one point, well-paid with “decent health and retirement benefits.” But are we going to pretend that arrangement has to go on forever? Do we HAVE to keep every industry that ever existed? Should we all have to use typewriters because it’s the only way to save those jobs and protect the middle class?
No. Because we want progress. We want CHANGE [queue inspirational Obama footage].
Or, at the very least, we want this stream of nonsensical partisan bullshit to end. Because - unfortunately - it does impact public opinion and public policy.
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dwangelo posted this
