Mitt Romney dropped by Bill Clinton’s philanthropalooza to show off his bipartisan bona fides today. The presidential candidate, fast-slipping in the polls, took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative to deliver a 15-minute speech praising the awesome might of free enterprise.
“Free enterprise has done more than any other system to bless humanity,” Romney said, explaining that the market has improved more lives than “any other system in history.” It also apparently has restorative powers: “It can not only make us better off financially, it can make us better people.”
He gave his paean to capitalism in the context of a semi-critique of our foreign aid system, which Romney says isn’t as effective as private sector efforts.
“We hear cases where funding is diverted to corrupt governments,” he said, and about cases where money is continually spent with little signs of improvement. As such, the government should continue to provide aid, but also “leverage” the wisdom of the private sector, so as to better help it deliver goods and services. He said that if elected, his administration would launch something called “Prosperity Pacts,” an ambiguously defined program which would somehow partner with developing countries (that are willing to sign some kind of trade agreement) and foster innovation with the entrepreneurs there. Or something.
Romney seemed much more in his element than he does on the campaign trail — perhaps he felt at home in a room filled with rich and well-coiffed elites — and he even managed to execute an actual, 75% natural-sounding joke.
“If there’s one thing we’ve learned this election season, it’s that a few words from Bill Clinton can do a man a lot of good,” he said. “Now I just have to wait a few days for the bounce.”
But then it all went downhill. He dove into the problems in the Middle East, then diagnosed them with a single mantra: the people there want to work. Using Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vendor whose self-immolation helped spark the Arab spring, as an example, he said that it was a lack of access to jobs that was to blame for unrest in the region. Romney recouched the Bouazizi story in a weird stew of business terminology and Americanized Hallmark-style mythology. Bouazizi, who just wanted to sell some fruit, had his license to sell taken away from him, and then his stand and his measuring scales, which Romney called “his only capital equipment.”
Here’s where it gets good. Then, Romney said, when an official “slapped [Bouazizi] in the face, he cried out. ‘I just want to work!’” Romney repeated the phrase for dramatic effect.
“I just want to work.”
After all, “work transforms,” Romney said. He followed with the typically-vague slogan “work does not long tolerate corruption.”
In Romneyland, if Bouazizi had just been allowed to work, all would have been well. If all the Tunisians and Egyptians and Libyans would just get jobbin’, they’d stop all that revolution-making. Which, okay; unemployment is certainly a problem. But it’s just one among many. Like structural poverty and an unregulated free market.
Bouazizi, after all, was working his ass off, and getting nowhere. Partly because global food prices, as determined by Romney’s exulted free market, were skyrocketing. And increasingly large chunks of Bouazizi’s income were going to paying for food, leaving less for everything else. He was struggling to feed his wife and children. He surely felt helpless and angry. Maybe he wouldn’t have taken his own life in such an explosive fashion if he had been able to continue working. But it would have continued to be a grind; conditions were clearly already difficult in the region — you don’t typically set yourself on fire right after you lose your job unless things have been pretty shitty for a while.
Of course, examining the complex factors that contribute to instability in the Middle East isn’t nearly as fun as telling a tall tale about American capitalism.
