How economically illiterate has discourse in this country become that the premise of dismantling a company leads to enrichment is commonly accepted? That ostensively Republican candidates for President have taken to accusing another candidate of purposefully doing so while democrats go further by painting that candidate as gleeful in doing so with little retort is simply mind blowing. Many entities have attempted to explain many things over the last several days to include what Bain capital is, what they do and what the record of the firm was in regard to that type of business when Mitt Romney was there; alas it seems to be in vain as myth and delusion persist.
How greedy and envious has populist sentiment become that many willingly believe that there is actually companies that exist to take over other companies for the express purpose of closing them to destroy jobs and that there is tremendous profit to be had in that business? What explanation is there that can explain the notion that there is any money to be made in purposefully firing people?
Certainly there are people who have lost jobs as the result of a leveraged buyout or merger where the new owner made a business decision to eliminate some portion of the existing business and to them there is actual suffering because it is personal to them. This doesn’t mean that they lost their jobs as the result of a heartless corporate raider able to somehow profit by eliminating jobs. In a free market with consumers making decisions there is no guarantee that a job will last forever and companies do not exist for the purposes of providing jobs. A bought out firm may have been in a near bankrupt state before the buyout. A company may have a technology sought after by the new owner and excess capacity for manufacturing or capabilities redundant to that new owner leading to cuts. It’s not right, it’s not wrong and it’s neither fair nor unfair, it is what is in a free market capitalist economy that is more successful than any other kind of economic arrangement ever tried on a large scale encompassing millions of people in the history of the world.
The simplistic characterizations of the free market system only serve politics while dumbing down understanding of the real world. Yes, there are criminals in the world of finance. They are caught and punished for attempting to circumvent the free market. Gordon Gecko is a fictional character.
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