Richard Grenell, a former communications director at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration, resigned yesterday from his position as an aide to presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Why? Because he’s gay, and well, apparently that’s just too much for the Romney campaign to stomach as it continues to court right-wing homophobes.
Yesterday on my Facebook page, I half-joked that perhaps Romney actually has decent values, but betrays them willy nilly as they are trumped by his fawning cowardice. First he thought universal healthcare was good, now he doesn’t. First he thought regulating firearms was reasonable, now he doesn’t. First he thought the government shouldn’t interfere with women’s healthcare decisions, now he does. First he thought there was no problem hiring a homosexual. So much for that.
A superficial reading of all this is that Romney might be a decent guy who will, without hesitation, bail on anything he believes in if doing so gets him what he wants. In other words, that he will sacrifice most of his good values on the alter of one lousy value: Ambition.
Of course there’s nothing new to that analytical trope. Romney is, after all, a politician, and so it’s almost to be expected. Republican, Democrat, whatever. It’s cliché to note that many, perhaps most politicians bend with wind. And they don’t need a weatherman to know which way the votes blow.
But a story broke today that made me wonder if there’s another factor at play. Perhaps it’s not just the ravenous quest for political office that makes Romney so quick to pull all these one-eighties. Maybe it’s also because he’s a person with decent values who at times has 
surrounded himself with people who have god-awful values. People like Edward Conard.
Conard is a former partner of Romney’s at Bain Capital, the private equity firm that made them both staggeringly rich. Conard has spent the last four years writing a book, which will be released shortly. One of the premises is so foul as to make you marvel at humanity’s capacity to perform the mental gymnastics necessary to justify just about anything.
People believe what they want to believe, and apparently Conard believes that rising income inequality among Americans is a good thing for the United States.
In making his case, Conard notes that investment is generally good for the economy, and most investment comes from rich people. That part of his argument is not controversial. It’s actually a given. The problem is that he takes the assertion to an extreme and uses it to justify a growing gap in wealth that is not only immoral, but actually bad for the economy.
Conard’s fanatical faith in the marketplace leads him to believe that wealthy investors like himself are the economy’s saviors, and that the rest of us are merely consumers who should be grateful that they get to profit from the capitalistic swashbuckling of the super rich. From this notion springs all kinds of nonsense.
For example, Conard claims the real cause of our current economic calamity wasn’t irresponsible and unethical dealings by financial institutions that engaged in chicanery alike levering their debt by factors of twenty and misleading people about the credibility of junk investments. No, don’t you know, it’s simply because regular people got panicky and tried to pull their money out of the banks. Silly plebeians. If they’d just left it there so the super rich and financial institutions could have kept investing it, we’d all be fine.
I get the question from my students from time to time: Why is inequality of wealth bad for the economy? It’s not rocket science. In fact, there are many reasons, too many to list here. But the simple one I give them actually uses part of Conard’s logic. Go ahead, start thinking of everyone as mere consumers. Now here’s the thing.
If consumers don’t have enough money, they can’t buy the stuff that investors pay to have made. Get it?
During the run up to the Great Depression, this was one of the major causes since manufacturing drove the U.S. economy. The cycle of businesses paying workers to make stuff, and then workers taking their wages and buying stuff, broke down. Nowadays our economy is more diversified and service is an increasingly important sector, but the cycle still works much the same way. When income inequality gets to big, and too many people can’t afford to buy enough goods and services, the economy begins to grind to a halt.
But there’s another reason, a simple reason why a wide distribution of wealth is not a good thing.
Simply put, I don’t want to live in a society where a few folks are stinking rich and lots of people are poor. During the Cold War, the name for those kinds of countries was the Third World. Do you really want to live in the Third World? In a place where homelessness, slums, begging, hustling, and the miseries of poverty are widespread and part of the daily social fabric. Personally, it’s not the kind of society I want to be a part of. Nor do I see living in a gated community as some kind of answer; to me, that’s merely a gilded 
cage that only underscores the problem.
I want to live in a healthy, thriving America where average, everyday people have a real chance at a middle class life. Not only do I think that that’s not too much to ask, but I think it’s a good thing. And I wish that politicians like Romney would think more about what’s good and, and less about what will further their political careers.