You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at Jkfitz42@cs.com. This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.
Dante put those who made such cold and calculated decisions to inflict pain deeper in hell than those who succumbed to the lures of the flesh. You can see his point.
That said, we should not go overboard in our search for a remedy for crimes such as these. And there are those who are doing that. We now hear politicians, television commentators and angry callers to talk shows calling for a vast expansion of federal regulatory power to “make sure something like this never happens again.” Some go so far as to suggest that the Enron scandal is a symptom of the search for private profit in the capitalist system, and seem to yearn for the kind of political control over business found in command economies.
That’s the mistake. Enron’s executives took advantage of the public by abusing their power. Increasing government control of the economy would lead to even greater opportunities for abuse.
A socialist ideologue would respond to this observation by arguing that those in control of the economy in a socialist system are not motivated by the search for private profit, and, therefore, can be trusted with these vast regulatory powers. But, come on, only socialist true-believers would react to such an allegation with anything other than a horselaugh, considering the last fifty years of history. If you are offended by the power to do harm held by the executives at Enron, consider the power held by Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and the Communist rulers of North Korea. Can anyone in his right mind welcome the idea of the party hacks who surrounded these tyrants controlling every job, wage, price and production decision in a society? That’s what you get with socialism.
Consider the potential for harm with the central government in control of every aspect of our economic lives. You get out of college and want a job. The government has them all. Do you think that those who dispense them would play favorites? Why not? In socialism, the people who ran Enron would likely be the bureaucrats in charge of the government agencies that deal with these issues. No? What else would they be doing? Driving buses? Waiting on tables? The Soviet Union’s wheelers and dealers were the ones who set up Stalin’s Five Year Plans.
You want a place to live? You don’t go to the real estate section of your newspaper and look around in a socialist country. You go to the government housing authorities. They have a list of the available apartments. (No private property, no private houses.) You go on the list of applicants. Do you think the people who decide who goes to the top of the list would take care of their friends and those who agree with them politically? Check out Cuba and North Korea. The leaders of the Communist party do not live in the ramshackle flats where working people live. They know how to take care of their friends as much as Boss Tweed and the leaders of Tammany Hall ever did.
The only difference is that the people who live in Communist countries cannot move to escape the influence of corrupt politicians, or organize opposition political parties to seek reform. Democratic socialism exists in theory and in the lectures of Marxist professors at our universities. In the real world, socialist countries have been one-party states. It is no coincidence. Socialist ideologues brook no opposition to the interests of the working class – which they always claim to represent. If you oppose Fidel Castro, you oppose the Cuban people: that’s how the dictatorship of the proletariat works.
Do the Church’s social encyclicals offer any way to avoid future Enron problems? I don’t think so, except to the extent that Enron’s executives would have behaved differently if they were the sort of people who paid attention to the moral directives in the social encyclicals. Most employees and stockholders of most American corporations do not feel that they have been victimized. Enron is a headline story because it is an exception. Capitalism is not the problem. Socialism is not the answer. Virtuous corporate executives run upright corporations. Slimeball socialists abuse the people.
Look: we already have a Securities and Exchange Commission and Congressional committees with the power to investigate and prosecute companies like Enron. We have a free press investigating what went on at the top levels at Enron. We have opposition political parties looking to pin the blame on each other, thereby throwing light onto the problem. The social encyclicals deal more with the moral principles than with the nuts and bolts of regulatory economic authority. You can find passages in the social encyclicals that condemn the exploitation of workers (such as that which appears to have happened at Enron), but no technical analysis for how regulatory agencies should be set up to prevent such exploitation.
What about distributism, the economic theory associated with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, favored by some Catholics? Is there an answer there? I am not sure. Chesterton and Belloc called for laws to prevent the concentration of corporate power such as that held by the executives at Enron. They were as opposed to concentrations of corporate power as socialism. I am a great admirer of these “Chesterbelloc” insights. But I have come to the conclusion that their theories should be viewed more as poetry than prose. No question, there is an appeal to their imagined society of small farms and owner-operated industries. But how does one get there, without giving the central government enormous authority to outlaw and expropriate businesses that become “too big”? That is a lot of authority to grant a government. Would it not lead to all the abuses of power we associate with socialism? I can’t see why not.
Investigate what happened at Enron. Punish those who are found guilty of malfeasance. Seek a way to reimburse those cheated by them, if that is what happened. But let’s not go from the frying pan into the fire. The big-government answer is likely to be a remedy worse than the illness it seeks to cure.
