The issue will be the bane of our existence until November. Here it is only May – and the back-and-forth over Mitt Romney’s career in private equity at Bain Capital is already as confused as Facebook’s initial stock offering. Buffeted by TV ads, web videos, feigned outraged and zigzagging Democrats, voters undoubtedly are stunned by the sudden outbreak of high-decibel arguments over Romney’s business career.

But do these even matter? Amongst the background noise emerges the real question: What parts of Romney’s business experience would influence his actions in the Oval office? That is a central question that voters should evaluate, although finding the answers will not be easy given the frenzied spin from both sides.

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This is who Romney is -- a portrait in business success rather than selfless altruism. Coming out of that experience, Romney’s underlying problem with voters appears to be his inability to make the imaginative leap to grasp how other people live. In late April, Romney urged Ohio college students to follow their dreams: “Take a shot, go for it, take a risk. Get the education. Borrow money, if you have to, from your parents. Start a business.” These are laudable sentiments, except for one tin-ear detail: Most American families do not have a bankroll of, say, $50,000 or $100,000 sitting on the sidelines waiting to be loaned to the first child ready to launch a new business.

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This process of elimination inevitably leads back to Bain Capital. What matters is not Bain’s job-creation record but the values that Romney absorbed on the job. Romney’s belief in the creative destruction of capitalism, his conviction that a dynamic economy produces winners and, yes, losers would undoubtedly shape his presidency. That is his economic vision – and it is directly linked to his years at Bain.

I am in California today, looking for work, since I cannot find work in Ohio.

President Barack Obama's attempt to copy FDR has been a colossal failure. [font size="4"]That's not surprising, since Obama has never had a real job in his entire life. [/font]

Mitt Romney is a successful business executive. He is our only hope of ending the miserable economic doldrums we suffer from. He made his fortune the old-fashioned way: He earned it.

Jim Hilbe, Cleveland

Unlike his former colleagues, Conard wants to have an open conversation about wealth. He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off. This could be the most hated book of the year.

The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job. There are a huge number of people in our economy who want ready access to their savings — pension-fund managers, insurance companies and you and me with our bank accounts. And because economic growth comes from long-term investments in things like housing, factories and research, the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.

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Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run. As for exotic derivatives, Conard doesn’t see a problem. He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors, who bought them in droves. And they didn’t cause the panic anyway, he says; the withdrawals did.

A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.

"It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks,” he said. “We need twice as many people. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.