The United States needs a crash course in economics.
Or perhaps the economics teachers in our public high schools need the crash course in how economies really work, not the high and flighty aberrations which passes for learning in elite institutions throughout the nation.
The centralized, anti-capitalist bias of economics courses today almost disregards the fundamental value of scarcity. There is simply not enough of everything to give to everyone, whether the country function according to Communist, socialist, capitalist, or democratic principles.
The material world is inevitably a closed order, one in which politicians can promise the sun, moon, stars, and all the strata in between, but voters have only themselves to blame when taken in by the metaphysical kool-aid of getting everything without having to pay for it. The near defaulted Greeks are learning this notion the hard, and they are fully at fault for it.
Private equity is about making money. In fact, all business and capitalist initiatives are about making money. Job creation is a result of wealth creation. Men and women do not go into business because they want to hire people. We must stop demonizing entrepreneurs and corporations who are out to make a profit first and foremost.
Mitt Romney help create, build up, close, diminish and expanded business through his firm Bain Capital. We should not shirk or shrink from pointing out the obvious: in the course of making companies profit and profitably, some workers had to be let go. Capitalism is hardest on the capitalists themselves, however, as they risk a substantial amount of their own money to make money over a long period of time. Currently, they are harassed by shifting government regulations, populist uprisings, and cowardly politicians who spend more time reading the visible, risible polls instead of implementing steady economic policy.
Capitalism is about profits first. Job creation comes afterward, but not by primary focus, no more than a tea kettle boils on a stove because the cook is staring at it. The fire that drives investment is low and intense, rising to the surface, apparent to all only after money starts exchanging hands again, and that without extensive direction from the state.