I know I'm late to this party, but since Douthat decided to write about it in yesterday's paper, I figure I'm not unforgivably tardy. I saw that last week Steve Bainbridge posted a lengthy defense of Romney's work at Bain, and of corporate takeovers more generally. His defense largely matches Douthat's: a few eggs must be broken in order for capitalism's creative destruction to work its magic. Bainbridge very reasonably observes that: "[T]he creative destruction worked by takeovers makes the economy more efficient and frees up new social wealth. . . . Private equity firms played a huge role in busting up the conglomerate dinosaurs. Without a working corporate takeover model, however, the dinosaurs would still be clogging up our economy with their inefficient and outdated model."This is all fair enough, as far as it goes. I'm willing to admit for the sake of argument that the ability of firms to shut down factories and lay off workers fosters aggregate social wealth. From the perspective of Catholic social theory, what is problematic for me about Bainbridge's defense of Bain is the way it never leaves the world of aggregate welfare. Under Bain's watch, thousands of workers lost their jobs in order to free up capital to create new jobs elsewhere. How Bain's impact on employment nets out is in some sense irrelevant. We are supposed to understand that the local harms caused by creative destruction is all for the greater good, but what happens to the individuals left behind by this process? It is no doubt true, as Bainbridge would likely argue, that some of them will find new jobs and benefit from the greater dynamism of the broader economy. But what steps does Bainbridge (or, more importantly, Romney) favor for those who cannot start over -- those close to retirement or those whose skill set is poorly matched to the new economic realities? These individuals constitute the collateral damage of creative destruction. Even if they are outnumbered by those who benefit from greater economic efficiency, we cannot simply disregard them.As Catholic social thought has emphasized from the beginning, it is its narrow focus on wealth creation (for the owners of capital) and its tendency to disregard the well-being of workers, that makes doctrinaire economic liberalism so morally problematic. Workers are not fungible units of social welfare but human beings with dignity who are entitled to a certain level of well-being (income, health-care, the opportunity to educate their children, etc.) even if they have the misfortune of working for an inefficient firm that must close its doors.To his credit, Douthat touches on this at the very end of his column when he poses this challenge to Romney: "To win the White House, hell need to promise not only competition that leads to growth, but growth that leads to broadly shared prosperity. To defend his revolution, hell need to show that hes reckoned with its costs."While Douthat is asking the right question,Romney's answers to this question tend to rely on the sort of magical thinking that is typical of supply-side conservatism. Such blind faith in the distributive consequences of market mechanisms are utterly alien to traditional Catholic economic thought. In short, what is troubling to me about Romney's Bain capitalism is not his commitment to the benefits of creative destruction, but rather the conjunction that commitment with his opposition to the institutional structures that help toensure that the benefits of growth are distributed fairly and that those who are harmed by the measures necessary to pursue that efficiency are not left behind.Our experience over the past 30 years has taught us that, in the absence of policy measures to ensure equity, the benefits of GDP growth are not broadly shared. As we have seen, most of the gains of that growth have gone to the top 1/10 of the 1%. And this concentration of economic benefits is self-reinforcing as greater inequality has produced a government that is ever more responsive to the interests of those at the top. Increasing economic efficiency while undermining the state institutions -- progressive income taxation, the estate tax, labor unions, and the social safety net more broadly -- that provide a check on this concentration of benefits strikes me as hard to square with a proper concern for keeping the market's operation within the boundaries of social justice.I am not saying that Catholic social thought is opposed to structuring an economy in a way that promotes aggregate efficiency. I am saying that it treats efficiency as a means to an end -- a richer conception of human well being that makes reference to aggregate social wealth while taking seriously the dignity of the individual human beings who populate the economic system. And, in demanding an answer to Douthat's question about how to ensure that the benefits of aggregate growth are distributed fairly, it demands more than the invisible-hand-waving characteristic of trickle-down, supply-side economic philosophy.UPDATE: Bainbridge relies here. I think he is misinterpreting my criticism of his post's success as a defense of Romney against the Bain attacks as a criticism of his own views regarding corporate takeovers. My point was both narrower and broader than his reply suggests. It was narrower in that it's point was that the Bainbridge/Douthat defense of Romney is (from the perspective of CST) incomplete unless it takes into account more than the impact of Bain capitalism on social welfare. For this reason, his accusation of "parachute blogging" seems beside the point,though I plead guilty to not being a regular reader of his blog. My narrow (and limited) criticism was confined to the 4 corners of his post in defense of Romney against the Bain attack. But my point was alsobroader in that my concern goes beyond the question of the externalities of takeovers for stakeholders (the point of the Kodak post to which he links in the reply). The target of this broader criticism is, at the end of the day, Romney and the Republican economic program, not Bainbridge's particular views, whatever they might be.I'm interested in the more systemic question of how we as a society ensure that workers in a liberal employment market consistently have stable access to the things they need to live well. This includes access to education for their children, health care, food, shelter, stability, in addition to more takeover specific items, such as transitional relief and retraining assistance when their jobs disappear. There are many models for how to ensure that workers receive these goods -- they can come through regulated employment or through a robust social safety net provided by the state or through some other mechanism. Unemployment (and therefore corporate bankruptcy and takeovers, etc.) would be substantially less traumatic if people's health insurance and retirement benefits (among other things) were not linked so tightly to their employment. I'm also interested in how Republicans propose to combat the inequitable distribution of the benefits of economic growth that we've seen over the past 30 years, along with the attendant social and political dysfunction that results from excessive inequality. My question is what Romney (or at least this version of Romney), and Republican economic policy, has to say about these basic questions. The longer discussion at the end of Bainbridge's post is interesting (the part after he finishes with his charge of parachute blogging). I would love to see a Republican presidential candidate who shared these views or who was willing to make a strong argument for coupling liberal employment markets with a backstop of robust general welfare measures. Instead, what I've observed over the past couple of years is the Republican party -- and its presidential candidates -- doubling down on laissez faire. Take, for example, the Republican argument that extending unemployment insurance in times of high long-term unemployment only encourages the unemployed to stay that way. I find the particular combination of positions characteristic of Republican economic policy (liberal labor markets and broad -- and increasingly strident -- opposition to the institutions that make up our limited social safety net) very hard to square with the commitments of CST. Again, though, this is a criticism of the Republican party's program, not of Bainbridge's.