Jonathan Last grapples with Romney's work at Bain:
Free markets are, in the long run, wonderfully efficient and wise. The problem is, they aren’t, in the short or medium run, always wise (this is why we have bubbles); they aren’t perfectly free (every market is distorted by rent seekers and other externalities); and the efficiencies they produce are not always beneficial to society writ large (see the effects of the pornography and gaming industries). To understand these limitations is not to attack or disdain the free market. It is merely to give, as a very wise man once wrote, a clear-eyed “two-cheers” for capitalism.
Likewise, Bill Kristol adds that the "unqualified defense of the virtues of Bain Capital" is a recipe for "political disaster—and intellectual sterility":
What's needed is a willingness to put Main Street (at least slightly) ahead of Wall Street, and a reform agenda for capitalism that strengthens it, alongside an even more dramatic reform agenda for government that limits it. Bain Capital shouldn’t be demonized. It may not even deserve to be criticized. But in laying out a way forward, conservatives might remember that Bain Capital isn’t capitalism, that capitalism by itself isn’t freedom, and that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the Gospel of Wealth.
William Jacobson panics:
We are so screwed, we have allowed the Romney campaign and its supporters — and some well-meaning but misguided others — to turn us into the party of Bain.
Yuval Levin has more.
The Dish 