As this plays out in the public square, something quite fascinating and rather amusing is happening. Defenders of Romney, stung by the portrayal of him as a heartless job-killer, have defended him by saying that what Bain does is “just capitalism.” The Obama campaign, by contrast, seeks to draw a distinction between good capitalism, the sort of capitalism that has transformed America into a “middle-class” country of good jobs, home ownership, secure pensions, and health insurance; and bad capitalism, the sort of capitalism that sends jobs overseas, strips companies of their assets and leaves them as road kill, and throws the economy into chaos with unregulated financial dealings and obscene executive compensation.

What makes this such fun to watch is that while the critics of Romney have all decent, socially responsible, progressive folks on their side, the Romney supporters are right.

Capitalism does not exist for the purpose of creating jobs, any more than it exists in order to create a demand for coal or linen or aluminum. Labor, like every other input, is viewed by capitalism as a cost of production, to be minimized as much as possible. In the infancy of capitalism, owners resorted to such primitive devices as gimmicking the clocks in factories in order to extract a few extra minutes of work from the labor force [see Marx’s lovely descriptions of this in Volume One of Capital.] Capital drove down wages by substituting women for men and children for women as machine operatives. The workers fought back by organizing and withholding their labor, for a while with signal success. Today, with the communications and transportation facilities of the modern age, capital simply transfers its operations to whatever part of the world offers the lowest wages with the fewest regulations, leaving to their own devices millions of workers whose lives are devastated and their futures destroyed.