God and Bain

January 30, 2012 by J. E. Dyer

Continued from Page 2

Bain Capital and other private companies have no means to compel the people to guarantee profit opportunities for them. They operate within a set of conditions arranged for them by the government. Those conditions may actively hinder profit or artificially guarantee it; virtually all of them distort the natural incentives of a risk-based market. Bain and other companies may well lobby for certain government-arranged advantages, just as unions and other special-interest groups do. But only the government itself can turn them into mandates or guarantees, co-signed by the people.

It has become a great weakness in our philosophical approach to government that we take interventionism for granted, and spend all our time attacking or defending its various beneficiaries, while bewailing the plight of those who have to pay for it. I have no animus against Bain Capital or Mitt Romney for doing what made sense, given the environment of government incentives and regulations in which they operated. They did not create the rules of the game. What needs to be different is not the nature of the profit motive, but the interventionist bent of today's federal government.

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About J. E. Dyer

J.E. Dyer is a retired Naval intelligence officer and evangelical Christian. She retired in 2004 and blogs from the Inland Empire of southern California. She writes for Commentary's CONTENTIONS blog, Hot Air's Green Room, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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