The latest attack meme pointed toward Mitt Romney is the idea that he is an evil capitalist pig that fired people and sucked the blood of money out of their unemployed corpses while laughing all the way to the bank. Newt Gingrich recently bashed Romney, and the left is all over this including the LA Times, Politico and the NY Times among others.
The problem with this approach is that the attackers expose themselves as economically ignorant. They simply ignore or don’t understand how businesses work, succeed or fail. Funny thing, the president seems to be in the same boat, but I digress.
In order for businesses to survive they need to adapt with the supply and demand of their product. As economic conditions change they might find that they need to hire more people, or downsize. This is a natural occurrence in the business world. Most people have probably worked somewhere where they were laid off during slow times, or where a business shut down because it could not adapt.
Unions go through the same process when they negotiate the reduction of hourly employees to make sure tenured employees remain employed. It’s the law of the business jungle.
But Romney’s attackers don’t understand that. They want fairness and justice, even if it ends up closing down a businesses. After all, keeping more people employed for a few months before closing the company down is better than firing some of them so that the company can fight through a down period. Everyone gets a trophy, right? Why reduce a workforce by 20% when you can reduce it by 100% six months later if you just act with compassion and fairness in your heart? That worked out great for Solyndra, Caterpillar, or Chet’s, among others.
Mitt Romney created a multi-billion dollar company that employed hundreds itself while saving the jobs of thousands of people at the companies that he worked with. Some of those companies had to fire people in order to save the jobs of those that remained. That is how it works in the real world! If you have a problem with that, I suggest you move to another country where goods and services are created each according to his abilities, and distributed to each according to his needs.
Caterpillar is working just fine TYVM.
They earned $4.9 billion for 2011.
Funny though, they are demanding that workers take cuts of 55% in wages and eliminate their pensions at a Electromotive Diesel plant in London, Ontario.
These Romney/Bain Capital ideas are rather crude and greed-based. There are better solutions than 100% shut-downs. Companies must go to the table with concessions. They cannot expect peple, who have earned a respectable wage and middle class lifestyle to suddenly be forced to begin budgeting for low class income. It means changing their entire lifestyle. Try that sometime, you fat-cats who live in the lap of luxury, the liefestyles of the rich and famous. You didn’t all earn that with bleeding knckles, welder’s eye, and burnt skin.