Offshore Tactics Helped Increase Romneys’ Wealth

FredHayek wrote: Once again you are showing why this country needs Romney, he is a doer and a guy who understands how to make things turn out for the best.

The question, though, is whether any of these assumptions that people have about the ability of businessmen, or anyone from outside the political system of that matter, to function at the top of the political ladder are true. Bloomberg’s David Lynch argues, quite convincingly, that they aren’t :

There’s no equivalent in the corporate world to the separation of powers that often thwarts a president’s will. And the job demands political savvy more than managerial excellence.

“Our entire system of government is meant to preclude models and skills used in the corporate world, which may be why presidents with business experience are not our most successful presidents,” says Barbara Perry, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

Perhaps the most important point that Lynch makes is that, contrary to the way people seem to frequently put it, the Presidency is not like being a Chief Executive Officer. When a corporate CEO makes a decision, he can reasonably expect that what he decides will be what actually happens, and if it doesn’t then he’s going to fire someone. No such luck for a President. ...there is still much that an American President cannot do without the agreement of other branches of government. Often this means having to negotiate with a Congress controlled in whole or in part by the opposing party...

Bush, the first “MBA president” and his powerful Vice President Dick Cheney, who had been CEO of Halliburton, disproved the notion that businessmen are efficient managers or fiscally responsible in public office. The Bush-Cheney record—bungled occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the non-response to Hurricane Katrina, exploding national debt—and recent economic history should make Romney’s pitch a bad one for this election cycle.

And yet here is Romney, acting as if businessmen hawking deregulation and tax cuts are the solution to our economic and budgetary woes, not the cause of them. He has even gone so far as to favorably mention a proposal to amend the Constitution to require three years of business experience to be president. This, of course, would have disqualified great wartime leaders such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Even looking just at the historical economic record, Romney’s argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The economy has not performed better under presidents who had business experience.

How does familiarity with spreadsheets tell you what do about the unrest in Syria? Does having met a payroll make you better qualified to select Supreme Court justices? (George W. Bush’s initial selection of his under-qualified crony Harriet Miers suggests that it does not.)

Ultimately, governing is about policy choices, not creating wealth.

The greatest presidents? Notable business failures almost to a man, if they had any business experience at all. Abraham Lincoln racked up so many unpaid notes in his brief career as a storekeeper in New Salem, Illinois, that he referred to the obligations as his “national debt.”

This is not to say that no successful businessmen have ever become president. A few have, among them Warren G. Harding (an Ohio newspaper publisher and editor), Herbert Hoo­ver (a multi-millionaire mining engineer, investor, and consultant), and Jimmy Car­ter (a Georgia peanut farmer and warehouse owner).

But no one would argue that the one-term presidencies of Harding, Hoover, or Carter were anything close to successes.

When he ascended to the White House in 1929, many commentators expected that Hoover’s organizational acumen would make him a brilliant, practical leader. But the onset of the Great Depression later that fall required the skills of a master politician, and Hoover, who had never run for office before, proved to be a less-than-mediocre one. A stiff and awkward speaker, he neither showed empathy for the jobless nor rallied Congress behind a credible plan to reverse the nation’s economic slide. After a career spent commanding his own organizations, Hoover was unable to adjust to a job that required persuasion, adaptation, and compromise.

More important, Romney fervently shares the same mistaken credo preached by Hoover, Perot, and Cain. They all believed that to do well in business, which requires dedication to the narrow welfare of one firm or economic sector, splendidly equips one to triumph in the presidency, which demands a talent for reconciling competing interests and voter blocs for the purpose of advancing a semblance of the common, national good. To get rich may be glorious. But it does not qualify you to represent the best ideals of the country or to make policy for the vast majority of Americans.