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One specialist in corporate communications, sick of the hypocrisy of company "credos" or "mission statements," offered Enron's epitaph: "Why not just come right out and say it? 'We will strive to make as much money as we can without going to prison.'"
When a commercial entity fancies itself above the law or in control of the law, an Enron is the inevitable result. Collusion between capital and government is always a calamity for the common man. The philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius, writing in 1760 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, declared that there were only two types of government -- the good, which had not yet come into being, and the bad, which transferred the money of the poor into the pockets of the rich. Helvetius, once a tax farmer for the French king, knew whereof he spoke.
It's rarely noted that the best thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries -- radicals, moderates and reactionaries, from Montesquieu to Marx -- almost all regarded capitalism as at best an aberration, at worst a pestilence. But now these aristocrats, populists and socialists are as rare as snow leopards and, against all their predictions, America's cutthroat capitalism rules the West.
This is no cause for smugness, as Ken Lay reminded us, as Charles Keating and Mike Milken and Ivan Boesky and Teapot Dome reminded us, all the way back to John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, when free-market warlords divided up the United States like the bush chiefs divide Afghanistan. I accept capitalism because it's cynical about human potential -- though it claims otherwise -- and so am I. Who can deny that harnessing avarice creates wealth? (Though since 1979 virtually all of America's added wealth has adhered to the one percent at the top of the pyramid; so much for "trickle-down.") The key is the strength of the harness, and who holds the reins. And maybe just a trace of honesty.
Avarice, disguised as one of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is actually one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Capitalism is a calculated bargain with the devil. We invite moral vertigo -- and contempt -- when we mistake this compromise with our darkness for the source of our light. *