Vice President Joe Biden said "presidents aren't free market" while discussing the role of free markets and the country's economic struggles, in a Thursday interview with WTOV in West Virginia.
"There’s nothing wrong with free markets," Biden said, when asked about the economic views of Romney supporters. "Look, presidents aren’t free market. They don’t run a free market."
"The job of the president is to make sure you’ve got a job, make sure that we help businesses be able to work, make sure that we’ve got an infrastructure that allows businesses to move, make sure everybody’s in the deal," Biden added.
REPORTER: In the West Virginia primary, a lot was made of the fact that this guy in a Texas prison cell was able to grab 40 percent of the vote in the presidential primary. What do you make of that?
BIDEN: Look, I come from a household where whenever there’s a recession, somebody around my grand-pop or my dad’s table lost a job. A brother, a sister a friend, a neighbor. When you’re out of work, man, it’s a depression. And a lot of people are still hurting because of this god-awful recession we inherited that cost 8.4 million jobs before we could really get going. And so I don’t blame people, they’re frustrated, they’re angry. But at the end of the day, they’re going to decide: Is the way back to their employment, is the way back to them being able to have a job and raise a family, is it under the value set and ideas of Romney? Or is it under ours? And we feel confident we’ll do just fine.
REPORTER: Romney supporters may say, what’s wrong with free markets?
BIDEN: Oh, there’s nothing wrong with free markets. Look, presidents aren’t free market. They don’t run a free market. For example, Romney’s main job, as pointed out by one of his supporters, at Bain Capital is to make money for their investors. That’s a good thing. But that’s not the job of a president. The job of the president is to make sure you’ve got a job, make sure that we help businesses be able to work, make sure that we’ve got an infrastructure that allows businesses to move, make sure everybody’s in the deal. It’s a little bit—anyway, I just, all Romney has to do is go back and look at every other Republican president, what did—everyone from Abraham Lincoln and the railroads all the way straight through to Dwight Eisenhower and the beginning of the internet because of a federal investment—I mean, I don’t get these guys. They call themselves pro-business and they vote against our tax cuts for small businesses, they vote against giving a tax cut to small businesses for every new person they hire. These guys are—anyway. They come at this a different way than we do.