A One-Percenter Gives Far More than He Takes (George Mitchell is More Transformative Than Barack Obama)

Few have heard of George Mitchell, other than energy industry specialists and residents of The Woodlands – a model city Mitchell designed and developed from scratch north of Houston. But when history is told, Mitchell will have transformed the energy industry, the economy, environment, U.S. foreign policy, and geopolitics more than our self-declared “transformative” President. It is ironic that President Obama may owe his re election to a successful entrepreneur-risk taker, unappreciated in Obama’s world as one of those lucky people who “didn’t build it on their own.”

Obama’s lexicon automatically places Mitchell among the greedy one-percenters, who refuse to “give back to society” what they owe. Mitchell, however, has given back a thousand or a million fold. The federal government could pay him billions and still be in Mitchell’s debt. It was Mitchell, whose entrepreneurial spirit, risk taking, and perseverance gave us the fracking revolution.
Fracking is Mitchell’s achievement (more than any other single person), not that of the government’s roads, schools, and ports, as the President would like us to believe.

Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames tell George Mitchell’s story in their Freedom Manifesto, required reading for the right and left alike. They write of Mitchell’s fifteen year quest to develop hydraulic fracturing:
“In the 1980s, energy experts believed that the supply of natural gas was dwindling. This concern spread to Mitchell, a Houston-based independent energy producer…..to look for ways to replace his critical reserves….The problem was that (gas) was locked in shale, the extremely dense layer of rock under Dallas and Forth Worth.”

Despite skepticism from all sides,

“Mitchell persisted, working for fifteen years at his own expense. The result was an enhanced version of a technique called hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – that extracts natural gas by expanding natural or man-made fractures in rock.”

The 86-year-old Mitchell, the son of a Greek immigrant, father of ten, and self-made man, ranks as the 347^th richest man in the world. Demanding that a George Mitchell “give back” implies he took something that was not his. Not true at all. Mitchell’s $2.4 billion wealth is a pittance compared to the value he added to society.

go to forbes.com

Award for Best Defenses of Bain Capital Goes To John McCain and Steve Forbes

If Mitt Romney is the Republican nominee, he will somehow have to explain to American voters what private equity  is and its positive contribution to growth and prosperity. Because private equity and venture capital are complicated businesses, this task is not easy. I credit John McCain and Steve Forbes for coming up with the easiest-to-understand explanations.

Number 1: John McCain

Blitzer (Situation Room): How do you rebut that (claims that Bain cost jobs) in the general election?

McCain:  Well I’d compare that with the half billion we put into Solyndra with the 5 million they put into Staples which hires, I don’t know, ten thousands people or more. Unfortunately in the free enterprise system, there are winners and losers, and there is competition in the free enterprise system. When you total up what Bain capital did, the successes far outweigh the failures. And if you are not willing to allow, as tragic as it is, for some enterprises to fail, well obviously that is the essence of socialism.  Source

Number 2: Steve Forbes

In terms of Bain itself, I've not looked at the particulars but that whole nature of that business -- most businesses eventually succumb and if you can save it, that's great.
If you can start one that succeeds, that's great. But it's like baseball. Seven times out of ten you're not going to get that hit. The same is true with what he did in terms of equity capital. But the key thing is -- did he create jobs overall, because a lot of those companies that are going to portray him as killing jobs and that kind of thing would have gone under if they didn't have someone to save it. Sometimes you have to tighten the belt to save the company. Source