David Stockman was Ronald Reagan’s budget director, and he is challenging, skewering, dissecting, and examining in great detail something that the “mainstream media” won’t in his lengthy article in Newsweek: All that boasting by Mitt Romney about being a “job creator” who could successfully run this country as a business and create miraculous wealth for Americans.

Shorter Stockman: Oh come now:

Bain’s billions of profits were not rewards for capitalist creation; they were mainly windfalls collected from gambling in markets that were rigged to rise. Nevertheless, Mitt Romney claims that his essential qualification to be president is grounded in his 15 years as head of Bain Capital [...]

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.  [...]

I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. [...]

The credentials that Romney proffers as evidence of his business acumen, in fact, mainly show that he hung around the basket during the greatest bull market in recorded history. [...] Bain’s acclaimed success with another retailer—Staples—is also not what it is touted to be. [...] The Romney campaign’s feckless narrative that private equity generates real economic efficiency and societal wealth is dead wrong.