Is it possible to apply The Bain Method to the federal government?
If we put aside the debate of whether or not The Bain Method was successful or not, but instead focus on the question of how the business approach used by Bain could be applied to our government, could we convince more people to seriously consider their thoughts about electing Mitt Romney "because of his business experience".
I've found that when talking with my conservative friends, I can stump them by shifting the discussion from the results of The Bain Method to the method itself.
Most of the debate up to now has focused on the results that Bain generated. The Republicans will cherry pick “success stories” like Dominoes or Staples, while we’ll bring up our laundry list of eToy fiascos. Unfortunately, it generally descends into a shouting match where each side argues about the facts.
However, what if we instead set aside the results of The Bain Method for a minute, and focused the debate solely on the method itself? Try it, you’ll stump your friends!
What is The Bain Method?
Example #1) Buy a struggling company. Sell off its assets and rent them back. Offshore + Outsource. Leverage the heck out of all assets to generate one-time cash.
Example #2) Invest money into startup. Micromanage every detail of the company until it's wildly successful. Take credit for their innovation. Sell for huge profit.
Now, let's imagine for a minute that we think these methods are OK. Let's even pretend that we like these methods and the huge amounts of one-time cash they make for us and our friends. When we debate against Romney, we don't even have to challenge these methods as being successful.
Instead, we have to ask the question "How could we successfully apply The Bain Method to the federal government?"
The answer is pretty obvious that what might work in the public sector has no application to running a government.
Let's look at method #1). What would Romney do if he was president? Sell off the national parks and rent them back to us? Outsource the military? Offshore the NIH? What about leverage? If he were to balloon the federal debt to the same level that he increased the debt on the firms that Bain leveraged, our National debt would consume the entire GDP!
What about method #2)? The Bain Method certainly looks like centralized, top-down, socialism to me. Is Romney really arguing that we should set up a technocratic, centrally planned economy where a small group of elites pick the companies they want to fund and micro-manage? Sounds like big government socialism to me. How will that play with the Tea Party?
The bottom line is that we don't need to run against Romney's record, we just need to run against his method. We can even give him the benefit of the doubt that vulture capitalism, leveraged buyouts and corporate raiders are a successful way to make tons of money, they have no connection whatsoever to running a federal government.