After Paul Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s number two the Joe Soptic laid off steelworker ad comes into sharper focus. In the ad Mr. Soptic chastises the Republican presidential candidate for his wife’s death some five or six years after a Romney-less Bain Capital closed his steel plant. Seems like a pretty stupid ad, right? The facts make the ad silly even more a lie about Mitt, right? Maybe not silly, it depends on what message the ad is trying to convey. With the selection of Paul Ryan as a running mate it appears clear that the battle will be fought on what the fundamentals of the American economy will be going forward. Will we be a free market economy with a bit of regulation or are we a command and control economy with a little freedom permitted to provide a bit of efficiency?
First let’s watch it one more time to get it fresh in our minds.
The first thing the ad does is to make the point that Mitt Romney doesn’t know the damage he does to other people when he makes economic decisions, such as whether to close a plant etc. Is this an attack on Romney or an attack upon the decision makers in a free market economy generally. Isn’t it really just an implied suggestion that individuals making financial decisions that affect others should have to be supervised or regulated in order to protect the innocent people who are employed in uneconomical businesses. It is clearly an attack on the very idea that there are economic decisions which must be made on mainly economic bases.
The ad goes on to charge that, “Mitt Romney and Bain Capital made millions for themselves and then closed this steel plant.” Is that possible? Can a corporate raider firm really make a great deal of money out of bankrupting a company while at the same time avoiding charges of theft or lawsuits for fraud? I won’t go into great detail but I doubt this very much what with tax laws, securities laws, bankruptcy laws, fraudulent transfer laws, stockholder derivative suits and the rights of bond creditors (at least when the bond creditors are not investors in GM) I don’t think that business owners make money by destroying their businesses. The facts are dense and difficult to understand in such cases and can therefore be spun to make people believe all sorts of silly things. If there were no successful prosecutions or lawsuits arising from Soptic’s plant closing, I think that we can safely believe that nothing quite as untoward as Soptic suggests actually went on there.
Now we get to the meat of the story. After Joe unfortunately lost his insurance because of the plant closing, a decision in which he had no input, his wife was taken to the hospital with pneumonia and her lung cancer was discovered. There is no doubt that this is a tragedy. But Joe pins this tragedy on someone in particular, Bain and Romney. The fact that there was a five-year lag time between the lay off and the pneumonia is not referenced. This fact indisputably exonerates Bain and Romney. In response to the implied question as to why his late wife didn’t seek any medical advice for symptoms of the lung cancer, Joe channels his late wife and suggests that she knew they couldn’t afford insurance. This ad is a dual indictment against the owners of the company. Joe’s first charge is that because the owners had previously made a profit from the plant that they were morally required to keep the plant open regardless of its present profitability. Second, and somewhat more subtly, he charges that the owners, including Bain, took the best part of his working life and that he shouldn’t have been laid off and left as a man who could only get a custodian’s job when the plant closed. I feel sorry for Mr. Soptic and his many losses but I think he is clearly allowing his anger to be used as a tool in a political campaign. He is a man in pain, looking for answers as to why God has allowed these things to happen to him and the people he loves, and he should not be so abused by cynical political people who should know better.
Was Bain supposed to keep an unprofitable steel plant in business for five years to provide high paying jobs and medical insurance to the plant’s employees? Were Bain and Romney legally or morally required to indefinitely pay people’s insurance who had worked at a plant closed because it was unprofitable? Why was a fund to provide continued insurance in the event of a plant closing not a benefit negotiated in the union contract? Is it possible that the employees knew at the time of the takeover that they would have been worse off without Bain’s involvement? I doubt that many in this country would hold Bain and Romney morally responsible for Mrs. Soptic’s unfortunate death. By missing Romney, however, this ad makes the system of free markets, for which Romney is a poster boy, the malefactor in the Soptic story. Misfortunes abound in a free market economy as they do everywhere else. Ending the free market system, however, would be a profound misfortune for everyone who values their individual initiative and the right to pursue their own happiness as they each see fit. This ad is nothing more than Michael Moore’s brand of half-truths and innuendos brought to the small screen. I pray that Mitt and Paul can overcome the Obama assault on our cherished freedoms, economic, religious or whatever, and halt the progress of the endlessly dehumanizing bureaucracy of the social welfare state.
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