I can appreciate the distinction but don’t subscribe to it. I’ve been told that my profession (IT/internet) is not real because it’s 0’s and 1’s. Finance is a data oriented product at this point (debt instruments, derivatives) and I guess I don’t find it any less real than a widget. To each their own.
But if that is your standard and a 0 is no business experience (say community organizer) and a 10 would be someone like Henry Ford - then a) where does Mitt fall on the scale? and b) where are the rest of the candidates? IMO, I think only Huntsman has had a real job now that Cain is out.
I wasn’t saying financial products aren’t real. I was only drawing the distinction, that running an investment firm generally requires quite a different mode of thinking than, say, running an innovative entrepreneurial business from the ground up—such as creating a Ford Motors, or an Apple, or what have you. I’d believe the latter to possess superior working understanding about how the “real economy” works and what really it takes to create jobs, etc.
I’d place Romney somewhere around a 7.5 on your scale.
Of course, you are correct! All those who enable, or in any manner that doesn't coercively impose their will on the entrepreneurial enterprises, are real contributors to the wealth creation process. Traditionally, that process has been labeled "the free enterprise system," or, by the Founders, as "freedom of individual enterprise."
Whatever it is called, it represents the efforts of free people, under the rule of law, exercising their Creator-endowed freedom. As posted earlier (above), this was the system advocated by America's Founders, and it led to the greatest explosion of liberty, opportunity, prosperity and plenty in the history of civilization.
This is why, IMHO, the candidate who possesses the deepest understanding of the Founders' ideas of liberty may be the best qualified to combat on behalf of liberty in this election. It must be understood that this is a battle of ideas--fundamental ideas about the nature of liberty and the role of government.
It is not about running a business. It is about preserving the Founders' intentions for a limited government and free individuals. The antidote to the appeals and lies of the "redistributionist in chief" is a quickly-delivered dose of Jeffersonian wisdom on matters of liberty versus tyranny, spending, deficit, debt, taxation, regulation and control, and the ensuing consequences of that combination of government involvement in the lives of a nation.
The goal of the opposition candidate must be to first educate the citizenry in the founding philosophy, helping them to rediscover the ideas "embalmed" (Lincoln) in their Declaration of Independence and structured into their Constitution's limits on the power of Presidents, Congresses, and Judges.
If the candidate can achieve that goal, the November election will be a correction of course, in favor of liberty for individuals and a curb on Presidential power to "fundamentally transform" America.