Newt’s Free Market Heresy
by David Atkins
Newt Gingrich speaks heresy:
“Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation,” Mr. Gingrich said, “we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.”
At a campaign stop at the Don Quijote restaurant on the edge of downtown Manchester, Mr. Gingrich seized on one of Mr. Romney’s lines from the debate, when he said, in an effort to asert that he was not a lifelong politician, that he did not get into politics until he no longer had to pay a mortgage. Mr. Gingrich suggested his rival was out of touch with ordinary Americans.
“We want everyday normal people to run for office,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Not just millionaires.”
That’s not going to work out so well for Newt. Those are pretty words, but any capitalist knows that the whole goal of investment is to make lots of money off the surplus value of labor while cutting costs in order to provide greater value to shareholders. Entrepreneurship is beside the point, and job creation? Well, if an investor could produce greater profits by firing every employee and having gnomes do the work instead, they’d do it in a heartbeat.
Newt knows this, of course. He and all the other candidates have spent their lives in the service of destroying the middle class in pursuit of investor profits. Romney’s Bain Capital job cremation isn’t some sort of perversion of the free market. It’s the whole point of the free market.
But at least Newt understands that the real free market doesn’t exactly play well with actual voters. They know that their ideology is unAmerican even to their own primary voters, and they’re willing to actually admit it when it’s an intramural contest. Still, come June, they’ll all be singing the praises of Bain Capital and the “free market.”
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