Bain Capital must seem like a Frankenstein’s monster to Mitt Romney’s campaign Like Mary Shelley’s creature, it’s stalking its creator just as he’s about to claim the thing he loves most. But Bain Capital — and Bain Capitalism — isn’t Mitt’s creation. It was sewed together from the corpses of dead ideals and shocked into life in Washington’s political laboratories.
Mitt’s monster was created by a broken political process that’s allowed politicians in both parties to create an artificial, destructive and exploitative form of pseudo-capitalism — and often to get rich from it. Romney’s campaign will probably survive, but the monster will go on destroying lives and dreams.
Conservatives and self-described “centrists” speak about “Bain Capitalism” — aka “vulture capitalism” — as if it were the inevitable result of immutable economic laws. But it’s only been around for thirty years or so, after government policies in taxation and bank regulation made it possible. That’s right: Government, not free enterprise, made Bain Capitalism.