Firing People Who Provide Bad Service is Not Evil, It's Capitalism

Mitt Romney is taking some heat from fellow presidential candidates because he dared to fire people in his role at Bain Capital.  Jim Geraghty makes some good points in his Morning Jolt email:

If Mitt Romney's opponents embrace the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any further, they're going to start pooping on police cars.

So, here we are, on the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? They object to this more than to his liberal-softie-sounding rhetoric from 1994 and 2002? More than to his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than to the fact that he's won exactly one general election in his life -- in a year when the left-of-center vote was divided?

We're hearing objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government. How do we think all those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll -- mass alien abductions?

When you think about it, isn't it possible that the layoffs implemented when Romney was at Bain constitute one of the boldest moves of his career? It was one of the times he was willing to do something unpopular because he thought it was right and in the long-term interest of the institution he was managing, instead of following the polls and telling people what they wanted to hear.

Much of the focus was on Romney's comment that he likes being able to fire people who provide services to him if he's not happy with the quality of the service. You know, the way you can't with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the way you can't (or, at least, not without Herculean determination) with a crappy teacher at a public school. You can't fire a tenured professor at a state university, whether or not he gives good value for his salary and benefits to students and the taxpayers. We can't take our business to some other government without leaving the country.

The ability to compete for dollars, and to fire those who fail in that competition, is what keeps our economy sharp. The competition improves service, quality, and at the same time lowers prices. Just look at any organization that isn't subject to such competition and you'll see a mess (see the DMV, as mentioned above).

I'm no Romney fan, but I'll vote for him before I'll vote for a candidate who disparages capitalism and the things that result from the competition that helps our economy grow.