Forget Romney’s business experience

I am a Democrat and I congratulate the Republicans for apparently settling on the most reasonable candidate in their field. Mitt Romney has been a governor and has shown that he might be able to work with people of both parties toward practical solutions. If he wins the election, I have some hope for the future of the country.

Having said that, I believe his success as a private equity baron has absolutely no bearing on his fitness for the presidency, and I find his constant references to his business experience disturbing, rather than reassuring. Though he seems like a reasonable man, Mitt Romney personifies one of the biggest problems with the American economy: A very few people today are getting very, very rich, while providing almost no value to the society as a whole. In Warren Buffett’s words, Romney got rich just by “shoving money around,” and a nation as large and diverse as ours cannot build an economy on shoving money around. Not only do just a few people get rich in a business like Bain Capital, but almost no one else benefits at all.

Contrast Bain to a manufacturing business, or even to a large service-oriented business like a restaurant chain. There are wealthy executives in those businesses, too, but it takes a lot of other people to make the business grow and prosper.

So in discussing Romney’s past, let’s not get bogged down in whether this investment or that investment created jobs or destroyed jobs. Bain Capital never got bogged down in those considerations.

If Mitt Romney is fortunate enough to be elected president, we will best be served if he remembers his days in the statehouse in Boston and forgets all about his business experience. The private equity business has nothing to do with building a strong economy.

Guy Rosenthal

Wheaton