NUGENT: Bain Capital isn’t the problem

OPINION:

The first thing we need to fix is the lexicon. I have heard both President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney lay claim to how many jobs they created during their tenures in public office.

Here we go, boys and girls - Business 101 from the Motor City Madman. Pay attention. Class is now in session.

While public servants, neither of these guys created a single job in the private sector. Not one. Businesses hire people. Public servants do not. All they did or can do as public servants is assist by nurturing favorable conditions in which investors open their checkbooks, entrepreneurs take risks and businesses increase production. Or they can wreck the economy with wrongheaded policies.

At some horrible, dark moment in American history, governments at all levels start believing in and getting away with thinking their “business” is to spend taxpayer dollars. Actual businesses are in business to make money. That’s a big difference. Everyone, nod your head in agreement, as this will be a fundamental and reoccurring truism as the campaign season heats up.

In the rough-and-tumble world of business, people get fired for any number of reasons. They get laid off when business is not good. Businesses go out of business. Businesses buy other businesses and sell off their assets. People buy stocks in companies they believe are soundly managed and will turn a profit. If you don’t like this system, move to Cuba and occupy it.

The private sector is not some social-welfare experiment to see how many people it can hire. Businesses hire the number of people they need who possess the right skills, knowledge and business acumen. Bottom line: Businesses hire people who can help make the business more profitable. Profit makes the world go ’round. Profit is a beautiful thing and the foundation of the greatest quality of life known to mankind. It is called the American dream. Write that down.

As it pertains to Mr. Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, we don’t know how many people he hired or fired. What we do know is that he was in the business arena where the profit-and-loss dust was swirling, and he understands how the free market works. President Obama has never been in this arena. He has no firsthand knowledge of how the private sector operates. It’s called “cluelessness.” Mr. Obama is simply a government wonk - another hapless and ineffective bureaucrat.

Mr. Obama has never personally created a single private-sector job that I can find. He has never had to hire or fire an individual, stand in front of a shareholders meeting and take the heat, or comply with the dizzying array of government regulations that strangle the private sector. Bottom line: He couldn’t sell a blanket to a naked man in a blizzard.

What he has done is increase and extend the misery of those who are unemployed and underemployed. His policies have caused the free market to pull in its horns and wait out him and his anti-entrepreneurial cronies. His belief that government knows best is the primary reason the economy has been sluggish in pulling itself out of the recession.

But the media is out for Mr. Romney. They loathe free-market capitalists like him. They will do whatever they can to paint Mr. Romney to look like a free-market pirate, a corporate raider who does not care about people.

What our deaf, dumb and blind lapdog media will avoid at all costs is how the president’s policies have caused untold millions of people to be on unemployment or give up looking for work. That’s after burning through hundreds of billions of a taxpayer-funded stimulus. The destruction Mr. Obama has caused to the economy makes Jon Corzine, the Enron gang and other private-sector crooks look like the guardian-angel saviors of the free market.

When the truth comes out, and if Mr. Romney becomes the GOP nominee, the reality of which candidate has caused the most damage to jobs and the economy will be a no-brainer.

Fedzilla is the problem, not Mr. Romney, Bain Capital or the free market. Class dismissed.

Ted Nugent is an American rock ’n’ roll, sporting and political activist icon. He is the author of “Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto” and “God, Guns & Rock ’N’ Roll” (Regnery Publishing).