Certain political ads claim that Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s former company, is a bane on society. Supposedly Bain Capital destroys the wealth of certain people in order to increase the wealth of other people. Supposedly the benefactors are people who are already rich, and the losers are working-class poor people. It does this by buying struggling companies and dismantling them, thereby “killing jobs.”
Capitalism relies on the survival of the fittest, letting bad companies fail and using the freed-up resources to create companies that efficiently create wealth that more people can enjoy. Bain Capital’s operation merely facilitates that process. But not everyone believes that is a good approach to business for a modern society.
Never mind that such dismantling actually happens to only a small fraction of the companies Bain buys. Instead concentrate on those companies that are failing and might become targets of Bain.
Create a company like Bain Capital and do what it does only in reverse: Run your operation in a way that takes wealth from the people who are currently rich, and creates rich people out of the working poor! All you need to do is outbid Bain Capital on all those companies that it wants to buy and dismantle, give stock to the employees of those companies, and run those companies profitably. You will create more jobs, and you and your employees will get rich at the expense of Bain Capital, which will be locked out of the business of dismantling companies and killing jobs.
If that is your Big Idea, then you should take steps to protect it and use it as a platform to build wealth for your stakeholders. Because after all, both you and Bain Capital have that as your goal. You differ only in who your stakeholders are: For Bain it is supposedly people who are already rich, for you it is working people who want to become rich.