David Stockman, who was Ronald Reagan’s budget director, points out that Mitt Romney was no businessman. Mitt Romney: The Great Deformer
Except Mitt Romney was not a businessman; he was a master financial speculator who bought, sold, flipped, and stripped businesses. He did not build enterprises the old-fashioned way—out of inspiration, perspiration, and a long slog in the free market fostering a new product, service, or process of production. Instead, he spent his 15 years raising debt in prodigious amounts on Wall Street so that Bain could purchase the pots and pans and castoffs of corporate America, leverage them to the hilt, gussy them up as reborn “roll-ups,” and then deliver them back to Wall Street for resale—the faster the better.
That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system—a regime of crony capitalism—where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.
What Stockman (who has worked as a private-equity investor) leaves out is the fact that this is an inevitable outcome of capitalism. You could change the tax code all you want, but there can be no "honest free-market economy" under a system controlled by and rigged for those who own rather than those who work. But that's a rant for another time.