Romney: To suggest that profitable businesses don’t help people, is a really weird idea

This is it, my friends. This right here is why I stand ready to forgive Mitt Romney his political faults and put him in charge of this country come November.

If you haven’t noticed yet (wink wink), I’m rather a big fan of free enterprise. More than any other socio-economic system that man has ever come up with, no other method has yet demonstrated itself so effortlessly able to provide so much prosperity, opportunity, and freedom for so many people — because before you yourself can do well in the free enterprise system, you must necessarily produce a good or service that somebody else voluntarily wants to consume. The greater value society places on said good or service, the greater the reward.

Yes, Mitt Romney has fired people and shuttered businesses — good for him. That’s what should happen when jobs and businesses are no longer providing something for which society can find a use. For Team Obama to imply that creative destruction is tantamount to villainy, as if the laid-off workers are somehow doomed to joblessness for the rest of their lives, is beyond disappointing. Losing a job is devastating, but you pick yourself up and find a new way to be useful — or you would, anyway, if your current president’s policies didn’t have the economy moving more slowly than molasses in January. I realize that’s a brass-tacks version of things, but there it is.

If you watch nothing else today, I implore you (yes, implore — that’s how strongly I feel about this!) to watch the full video at RCP, but here’s the transcript of a fantastic segment of Romney’s interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan from yesterday (emphasis mine):

Well, there’s no question but that a number of places where we went in and invested we were investing in enterprise that was in trouble. That — where the future was very much in doubt for it. We invested in one business, I think it lost 50 or 60 or more million dollars the year before we invested. And a lot of people didn’t want to touch it. We were able to go in there with the current management team, help get the business back on track as an investor. The managers really ran it but they were able to turn it around and see a real success. It’s still around today, doing quite well. It provides jobs for a lot of people.

The idea that somehow making a business profitable is different than helping people is really a foreign idea. Because the whole American free enterprise system is associated with creating success, making businesses profitable. That means they can hire more people and grow.

And every investment that I made while I was responsible for an investment firm, every investment was designed to try and help the business grow and to become more successful. It killed us if something was not successful. If a business we started, for instance, couldn’t make it, and there were several like that, but there were several that took off in ways we never would have imagined. There were other businesses that were existing businesses we wanted to make better. Most of them we did make better. Those that we didn’t, we felt terrible about.

By the way, we lost money, investors money. We became investors ultimately in our career. We lost our own money in some of these cases, but the key was we wanted all of them to be successful. That’s the nature, by the way, of the free enterprise system. Not everything you invest in is success, hopefully most are. And as the people who invested with us, the pensions, the charities and college endowments that invested with us know, most of our work was successful.

And here’s another awesome nugget, just for good measure:

Beautiful. Textbook, even. Why am I so excited for the presidential debates in October? Because that, friends, is how Mitt Romney speaks off-the-cuff, while when President Obama goes off the teleprompter, he produces frighteningly anti-free enterprise quips like “you didn’t build that.” Exit question: Who are you going to vote for in November? If the answer isn’t obvious — look at your life, look at your choices.

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