Issac Bailey | Cordial politics possible

A few things became abundantly clear this week as Myrtle Beach enjoyed its turn as the center of the political universe.

Democrats and Republicans can enjoy each other’s company and respectfully disagree, as they proved during the 5th annual Martin Luther King Day community and awards breakfast Monday morning in Myrtle Beach, where the majority of the speakers who addressed a mostly black and receptive audience were members of the Grand Old Party.

Democrats and Republicans believe the federal government can be a great job-creation engine, as evidenced by their hand-holding in press conferences and parades about the necessity of Interstate 73, which they say can create 29,000 jobs and lead to the type of economic diversification the Grand Strand has long sought.

But more importantly, if you apply the logic that will be used to condemn and praise the private-sector work of the man most likely to win the state’s Republican primary Saturday and all but wrap up the presidential nomination, the government should be credited for the creation of businesses as diverse as the Fox News Channel, the Rush Limbaugh show, Google and Facebook.

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney is leading all the major polls nationally and in South Carolina. His campaign decided months ago to put a laserlike focus on his work as a former corporate executive who understands business and the economy. The heart of the strategy involves his claim that the work he did with Bain Capital created more than 100,000 jobs.

To arrive at that number, the Romney camp had to do a variety of things, beginning with ignoring the ventures that failed or led to the bankruptcy or downsizing of some of the businesses in which Bain invested, including the former parent company of what was called Georgetown Steel in the 1990s. The steel mill had at one time employed more than 1,400 people in good-paying jobs, the kind that allowed men and women throughout the South to balance work and family responsibilities. A living wage is as much about family values as are debates about gay marriage.

After Bain, the mill went bankrupt, shuttered its doors a few times and has since reopened under new ownership with about 300 employees. During Monday’s debate at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center, Romney blamed the massive job loss in Georgetown on the flooding of the steel market by cheap material from China. His critics, including his GOP opponents, say that companies such as Bain sometime swoop in on vulnerable and healthy enterprises and extract as much profit as possible, often leaving it weaker and forcing taxpayers to make good on the promise of retirement benefits on which Bain reneges.

It doesn’t even matter whose right because the mill’s economic journey illustrates one of the open secrets about free enterprise. Big business is not about job creation, it is about profit making. Companies such as Bain create jobs when it is good for the bottom line and cut them for the same reason. That principle has led to incredible job opportunities and innovation, but also untold pain.

Bain investors care more about a return on investment than the impact a shuttered mill will have on downtown Georgetown. Bain is more concerned that the relative few who risk millions to acquire businesses make millions more in return, than it is about someone wearing goggles and fire-retardant outfits while making steel rods for the cable-stayed bridge in Charleston, as Georgetown steel workers once did.

It leads to a lot of good in the long term even if it feels bad in the short term. And that’s why it is OK, in the minds of some, that upward of four-fifths of the economic wealth created in this country the past 35 years went to the already-wealthy, and that even after almost 9 million people lost their jobs during the economic downturn, it was OK that corporations earned record profits and shelled out record-levels of executive pay after taxpayers had to save the financial industry from collapse.

Romney’s claim of having created more than 100,000 jobs – for months he said created and only recently added the modifier helped – rests on the hope that no one will mention places such as the former Georgetown Steel. And it also relies upon the belief that only the companies Bain invested in and eventually grew should be counted, which is why the political ads running on TVs and radios this week in South Carolina from Romney’s supporters talk about Staples, even though Bain did not come up with the idea for such successful companies, didn’t manage them and most grew long after Romney had stepped down as CEO.

By that logic, the federal government should be credited with the creation of Google and Facebook, because it was the federal government that initially invested in the technology that eventually became the Internet, a resource without which Google and Facebook wouldn’t exist.

And the government made that investment after the private sector balked because they could not foresee the major profit potential.

By Romney’s job-creation logic, Rush Limbaugh, the Fox News Channel and Jerry Seinfeld are all creations of the federal government, because an investment in the public airwaves made each of those shows possible.

By Romney’s logic, Microsoft is also a government creation because of the public infrastructure Bill Gates has repeatedly said he relied upon to put his incredible skills to use.

By Romney’s logic, those few thousand Boeing jobs being created in North Charleston are really government jobs because of the taxpayer-financed airports and road systems Boeing can’t do without.

Same with the manufacturing hub in the Upstate that was established when BMW set up shop there. And by Romney’s logic, the failure of a government-backed business such as Solyndra shouldn’t be seen as a failure after all, just a bump on the road of high-wire investing because some won’t pan out as planned but overall such investments lead to a stronger economy.

The irony is thick. Democrats and Republicans can agree on the importance of government in spurring economic development and the impact of free enterprise on individual wealth creation.

It’s just that some refuse to recognize or admit that reality.