Daddy’s boy?
I thought about this supposed influence after reading today’s story in the Times about Mitt Romney negotiating for himself a big cut of Bain Capital’s profits from the buyout deals that the firm has made after he left the firm in 1999. Because this is one area where George Romney was distinctly different. From another fine Times piece in 2007 by David Leonhardt, contrasting Mitt Romney’s wealth — then estimated at $350 million — with his father’s far smaller fortune:
“George Romney, on the other hand, voluntarily turned down $268,000 in pay over five years when he was chief executive, which was equal to about 20 percent of his total pay during that time. In 1960, for example, he refused a $100,000 bonus. Mr. Romney had previously told the company’s board that no executive needed to make more than $225,000 a year (about $1.4 million in today’s dollars), a spokesman for American Motors explained at the time, and the bonus would have put him above that threshold.”
That’s a perfect illustration of the difference between old school American capitalists and the Randroids who populate the boardrooms today. Mitt Romney is definitely one of the latter.
I suspect that it was the depression that produced George’s philosophy. Smart investors and business executives learned that gilded age practices eventually lead to bad results —and not just for poor people, but for everybody. The riverboat gambling ethos had been beaten out of them by an economic disaster.
One might even say that this is why bailing out all these executives by letting them keep their obscene bonuses and coddling them like a bunch of Ming dynasty princesses becomes a —- moral hazard. Instead of coming to understand what George Romney understood back in the day, they end up spouting this drivel:
In less than a year, the American people will go to the polls and choose a new president. A matter of great moment is at stake in this election. The question we will decide is this: Will the United States be an Entitlement Society or an Opportunity Society?
In an Entitlement Society, government provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk. In an Opportunity Society, free people living under a limited government choose whether or not to pursue education, engage in hard work, and pursue the passion of their ideas and dreams. If they succeed, they merit the rewards they are able to enjoy.
The heir who parlayed his famous name into a big job as a vulture capitalist merits 350 million while the rest of the entitled parasites, looters and moochers who need such trifles as Social Security or unemployment insurance don’t. That’s quite a leap from the way George Romney looked at things. (I don’t think he’s the one who was brainwashed.)
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