The irony of the Enron bankruptcy is that the very people who would have been protected by ethical accounting standards would have whined like hell if such standards had ever been adopted.

Remember what happened. The auditor overvalued the company's assets in reports to shareholders in exchange for millions in accounting business. Everybody made money until the false accounting was exposed by cash shortages.

None of the money-making tactics was clearly illegal (though some were obviously morally objectionable), mainly because applicable laws and standards were relaxed progressively over the course of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush reign, so that almost nothing is illegal any more. The securities trading laws are as permissive today as at any time since the crash of 1929 and the resulting depression.

The typical 1929 stockholder would have energetically opposed any sort of governmental regulation--even measures that would have protected him--and that hasn't changed much over the intervening years. Being a stockholder of a company with overvalued assets is a good thing until you're discovered. In a system that allows the overvaluation of assets, every corporation must be presumed to have inflated its value, including the one in which you hold stock. Anything that covers up the truth is a thing of monetary value to every shareholder in such a market.

And so, stockholders, more than other people, are tolerant of ethical lapses in business and government. Stockholders just want to make money, after all, and they don't want anybody looking over their shoulder or getting in their way. A mandate for a legitimate accounting is the last thing these people want, and corporate directors and managers who propose such things don't last long in business.

People must understand that when they put money aside to make money in a market corrupted systematically by relaxed standards, they bet against their personal core values and impair their own ethics. They give money to people who will, for money, use it to subvert any value or corrupt any virtue, to the full extent allowed by law and practice. The value of a stockholder's investments is at all times imperiled by strict standards and honest practices.

It would be nice of business were not a branch of organized crime, but it is. Business no longer includes corner druggists, independent newspapers, family farms, neighborhood brokerages and agencies, and other first-tier enterprises that trade on integrity and reputation. These sorts of businesses have been eliminated or swallowed up gradually by less scrupulous, (and consequently) more powerful players and have become extinct in many places.

Conscience, it turns out, is the heaviest burden a business manager can carry into the 21st Century. Conscience costs, and the costs have changed the basic character of business, so that it's simply predatory now. Non-predators are prey.

In Enron's case, given the permissive atmosphere and its widespread acceptance among capitalists, sound business practice was simply a matter of cashing out in time. Some did and some didn't, but they should all have known they were dwelling on a bubble.

And they did know it. That's why, corrupted thoroughly by the investments themselves, these people, through proxies in government, rebuffed all efforts to expose their investments' actual value, and so they remained unprotected, and some lost everything.

They were treated justly by a market they helped to defile. The rest of us got screwed.