Creative Destruction

The process within capitalism whereby the old is replaced by the new has been called "creative destruction" since Marx coined the phrase. This is what Romney is actually defending without actually saying it in so many words. I doubt that Perry has heard of it. It is most commonly associated with economist Joseph Shumpeter but I like this description from Marshall Berman:

The truth of the matter, as Marx sees, is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. "All that is solid" — from the clothes on our backs to the looms and mills that weave them, to the men and women who work the machines, to the houses and neighborhoods the workers live in, to the firms and corporations that exploit the workers, to the towns and cities and whole regions and even nations that embrace them all — all these are made to be broken tomorrow, smashed or shredded or pulverized or dissolved, so they can be recycled or replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms. The pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate. Even the most beautiful and impressive bourgeois buildings and public works are disposable, capitalized for fast depreciation and planned to be obsolete, closer in their social functions to tents and encampments than to "Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals"

The "creative" part of the concept is a close cousin to the mystical "wisdom" of the Market or direction of a guiding "invisible hand"( Adam Smith) ,an ordering Cosmos in laissez- faire ideology as expressed by the Austrian school( von Mises), Hayeck and later Chicago School economists ( Friedman) and now market libertarians like Ron Paul. It is a Force, either of the social-Darwinian-natural-selection variety or of some Higher Power.

What is interesting is how little interested in all this the citizens of the little town in S.Carolina, home of the now-famous "vultured" factory, are. They are used to being blown about. First their slave-based agricultural economy is torn from them, then the textile mills shut and jobs shipped off. Now different manufacturing plants come and go and the suppliant workers just go with the tide. It helps that they are very religious and believe what they see on television.
But it's the only life they ( and our new friend Patrick) can now imagine, waiting to see what factory the Invisible Hand shuts down, which one It puts up, who buys a new pick-up, who gets food stamps, who gets cancer. Just wait and see.