Dirty Dealings? Bush Is Shocked ... Shocked! Companies like WorldCom and Enron were not a natural manifestation of the free-market capitalism celebrated by the likes of Adam Smith. The corporate manipulators of the market that we are now seeing were precisely the enemy of the "invisible hand" celebrated in Smith's economics classic, "The Wealth of Nations"; they betrayed the solid post-Great Depression regulatory foundation designed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prevent large corporations from subverting the integrity of the free market.

The fervent deregulators of the last two decades were not interested in a truly free market in which profit is dictated by consumers choosing what they want to buy. On the contrary, although government interference in the economy was corporate America's most convenient scapegoat for its failures, this was also exactly what it wanted. Regulations that suited its purposes were just fine. Corporate America was very much against government action to protect the environment, consumers, the poor or even shareholders trying to read annual reports, but it had no compunction about buying legislative loopholes that the clumsiest of con artists could jump through.