In this week’s Capital Times, Mike Ivey reports that Scott Ransom, CEO of Madison-based Erdman Company, recently paid cash for a $2.15 million home in Arizona. The home is in a gated community where the initiation fee for a golf membership is $135,000, and the monthly membership fee is $486.

Ransom’s company also laid off 130 employees in January.

The Scott Ransoms of the world are a big problem for the Republican Party.

Ransom may be a Democrat for all I know, but it doesn’t matter. Before the Republican Party can make a comeback consistent with its principles, it needs help from the private sector. Specifically, it needs a private sector the public can believe in.

The core selling point of a conservative political party is that the private sector is inherently more efficient, dynamic and ethical than the public sector. That’s a hard sell these days. There are too many examples of public-sector excess for the public to swallow free-market fundamentalism.

It was the private sector, not the government, that got the bright idea to insure bundled mortgages.

It’s a private-sector bureaucrat, not a government bureaucrat, who’s more likely to stand between a patient and the health care he or she needs.

It’s the private sector, not the government, that can change your credit card interest rate on a whim.

It’s the private sector, not the government, that outsources call centers to India.

It’s a private-sector executive, not a government bureaucrat, who can leverage an eight-figure golden parachute for running a failed enterprise.

It’s a private-sector executive, not a government bureaucrat, who’s more likely to spend $1.2 million renovating an office.

For the public to regain faith in the private sector -- and the Republican idea of private-sector supremacy -- the private sector must behave with more restraint and embrace a sense of long-term economic stewardship. There are many businesses that operate that way, but far too many are run by “vampires,” to quote former CNBC anchor Dylan Ratigan. Rather than sustaining companies, vampire executives focus solely on raising their company’s stock price to trigger short-term incentive bonuses. When the company tanks, executives keep their bonuses while workers and average stockholders get stuck with layoffs and investment losses.

Most Americans don’t relish these outcomes and have no problem with a government that seeks to mitigate them. That’s hardly a radical notion. The quality of any enterprise, whether it’s a corporation, public school, church, credit union or American Legion post, is dependent in large part on the people who lead it. The public and private sectors have different missions and respond to different incentives, but there’s no mystical distinction between the two. Either can succeed. Either can fail.

It’s not a concession for Republicans to embrace the notion of civic virtue and acknowledge areas where the free market is producing outcomes most Americans reject (income distribution, for example). Conservative columnist David Brooks, however, implies Republicans don’t get it:

“The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end.”

Republicans are right to this extent -- when private-sector enterprises are run by competent and ethical people, they produce optimum outcomes. The problem is that much of the private sector is broken, and Republicans won’t even acknowledge that fact, much less acknowledge any of its consequences. Perhaps that’s appropriate. The revival of the Republican Party is, at its very core, a private-sector enterprise.

Steve Rundio is the Perspective Page editor of Tomah Newspapers.