“IF PEOPLE NEED A JOB,THEY NEED
TO GO LOOKING FOR A JOB, AND THEY
NEED TO TAKE WHAT THEY CAN GET UNTIL
THEY CAN FIND SOMETHING BETTER.”
unemployed, a view that often
comes down to a simple, and simplistic, distillation: Able-bodied
people who don’t work are just
lazy, and it shouldn’t be the government’s job to help them.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt
Romney espoused the view earlier
this year, when he told donors at a
private campaign fundraiser that
he believed that half the country is
dependent on government.
“I’ll never convince them that
they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,”
Romney said.
Just as Romney’s tough talk
about personal responsibility
seems out of sync with his own
privileged background, LaRoque,
too, has seemingly played by a
different set of rules. His job offer
to Treadway may have triggered a
sequence of events that shredded
his own tale of personal success
achieved solely through bootstrap
entrepreneurship and ultimately
led to a grand jury indictment —
leaving him on the verge of possibly losing everything he has.
A MAN WITH IDEAS
LaRoque hadn’t always taken such
a hard line on workers. After earning an MBA from East Carolina
University in 1993, he founded
two nonprofits, the East Carolina
Development Company in 1997
and the Piedmont Development
Compan y in 2004.
The nonprofits acted as a transit point for loans from a U.S.
Department of Agriculture lending program aimed at alleviating
poverty and spurring economic
growth in low-income, rural areas nationwide. Known as the
Intermediary Relending Program, it allowed groups like LaRoque’s to borrow the money at
a one-percent interest rate and
then relend it at a higher rate to
struggling rural businesses, with
the idea that the groups would
use the profits to pay operational
costs and relend principal that
borrowers had paid back.