ROY EDROSO

At Popshot a marketing team called Capitalist Chicks is interviewed, and pictured in cute t-shirts. I must say that conservatives' use of girl flesh as a promotional tool has improved, though their thinking has not.

At its website ("Where capitalism gets a facelift!"), CC focuses on empowerment of women via personal finance strategies. This is laudable, but its members also dabble in Randian philosophy. They declare themselves against "statism," but just as they seem to be applying this stick to corporations as well as to socialists--a worthy theme at the present time--they double back, defending the big boys against "class warfare":

"We are seeing less and less pure capitalism, and more government regulation and intervention (AKA: statism). People look at giant corporations getting all kinds of government kickbacks and handouts. It is the class warfare mentality: us against the 'big guy.' So many times I hear commentary which classifies 'the rich' and 'the working class.' This implies that the rich do not work?"

They do work, of course, but are often compensated on a scale so inversely proportionate to their productivity as would make a Teamster blush.

Speaking of Worldcom, original Right Grrl Peggy Noonan has posted a whopper on the subject. She attempts to find the cause of Corporate America's many recent scandals, settling on a personalization, the "White Collar Big Money Psychopath" (based, as is her wont, on some guy she encountered briefly and unpleasantly). This Psycho, she maintains, is the culprit whose dastardly actions have damaged the good name of capitalism--in Noonan's view, his "single most destructive act."

Whence came this Psychopath? Here Noonan is murky. But she is shining-city-on-a-hill clear about the other sort of businesspeople: "The work they do changes the world. And in doing this work they strengthen the ground on which democracy and economic freedom stand. They are, that is, patriots."

Do such patriots exist, even in the day of the Psycho? Here again Noonan is less than clear. At one point she says a businessman of "celebrated rectitude" would "never fit in" on the Wall Street of today, but his type comes magically to life near essay's end, so that she can prescribe that its exemplars "shun" the Psychopath in future dealings.

No doubt the Psycho will be shunned, not because he is a Psycho, but because he is a loser. (Indeed, a recent Sunday Times Style section article has asked, "Do You Ditch the Place Cards of Infamous Pals?" with accompanying photos of Martha Stewart, Ken Lay, et al.) The market judges its stars, as always, by the rate of return they produce, not their pathology, and they are only put to paid when the jig is up and the stock plummets.

It is appealing, to some people, to neatly define our economic (and, while we're at it, political) problems as character flaws that can be settled by shunning, or other punitive measures. "I'm all for suing the pants off anyone proven guilty of fraud," says Alan Reynolds at the National Review Online, "barring co-conspirators from serving as corporate officers or directors, and using prison sentences when appropriate (though victims can't squeeze much reimbursement out of jailbirds). It is the uncritical rush to 'reform' accounting and to encourage runaway regulation that worries me." He instead favors "a much quieter, more selective and more professional SEC." In other words, the solution to increasing market abuses is less, not more reform.

From their perspective this makes sense, because if the malefactors, however numerous, can be scapegoated, attention will be deflected away from the system, which must not be questioned, let alone reformed. To this end, elsewhere at NRO, James Bowman asks us to stop using the very word "capitalism" in these dark days, because it "implies that there is some alternative to it--which is the cue for the socialist..."

Our market-fueled way of life has been questioned but little in recent years. Given this, one might expect a sanguine response from its defenders in this time of crisis. Yet they scold, they sneer, they blame Democrats, and eagerly pitch their former Wall Street allies to the wolves.

Could things be even worse than they look?