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 ntroducing
the pro-corporate Democrat.
Partisan opportunism
has a way of twisting parties away from their ideological anchors
in strange ways. So it was that Republicans became boosters of the
independent counsel during the Clinton years and occasionally were
critics of U.S. military intervention (sometimes for legitimate
reasons, sometimes not).
Lately, of
course, corporate scourge Henry Waxman has been arguing that the
Bush administration foolishly didn't act to save the supposedly
evil Enron corporation, for the sake of the little guy, all of those
shareholders and employees.
This, from
a liberal Democrat, amounts to a kind of revelation: The interests
of ordinary people can be caught up in the well being of a corporation.
After all, thriving and profitable corporations don't create aggrieved
former shareholders and employees.
Now, all that
is necessary is for Waxman and Co. to acknowledge that corporate
employees are honest and hard-working — as we've been hearing
in all the Enron personal-interest stories in recent weeks —
even if their corporation doesn't collapse.
Then, Democrats
might stop their attacks on efforts to create a pro-business economic
environment as sops to "the rich," and perhaps admit that
they are good-faith (even if misconceived, depending on your view)
attempts to maintain solid places of employment for millions of
workers and profitable investments for millions of shareholders.
Again, because
if a company goes under it's not "the rich" who suffer
primarily, or maybe even at all, but the little guy.
This is one
reason that all the talk about Enron's soft money buying it attention
from Washington is simplistic. Yes, it certainly helped in a big
way.
But a company
like Enron is important and worthy of consultation on important
policy questions whether it gives money or not, simply because so
much is riding on it, in this case the interests of thousands of
employees and shareholders and the welfare of a major Texas city,
Houston.
Given that
fact, an administration would be crazy to draft an energy plan without
consulting Enron, and indeed both the Clinton and Bush administration's
did give Enron a hearing (one reason Enron, however, didn't always
get its way was that there were plenty of other interests lobbying
Washington with conflicting agendas — which is exactly the
way the system is supposed to work).
Of course,
liberals will argue that bowing too far to corporate interests allows
companies to run free of the government regulation that keeps them
minimally honest, and therefore protects shareholders and employees
from the consequences of fraud.
There is something
to this — and the current securities and accounting rules bear
some scrutiny. But it is important to remember that the fundamental
reason for Enron's failure, as the indispensable Holman Jenkins
points out in the Wall Street Journal today, is that it bet
wrong on both the energy and tech markets.
Perhaps with
better rules, Enron's predicament would have become clearer sooner.
But there's nothing to stop businessmen from making bad decisions,
and no way to squeeze the risk from the high-wire act of capitalism.
This is all
the more reason that the government should be extremely careful
about doing anything that makes the life of entrepreneurs harder
than it is already. After all, when businessmen succeed everyone
gains, when they don't everyone loses.
Just ask Henry
Waxman.
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