On the other hand, Allario is moved not to anger but to a sort of empathy at the sight of Jeff Skilling testifying before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on CNN. "I still respect some of those guys for their mental acuity," he says. They have "a creative, special brainpower." What's more, Congress will find it difficult to prove actual fraud, he suspects. "Enron knew the laws as well, and sometimes better, than our own accountants," he tells me. "The job of Enron's finance and accounting groups was to find a way to structure around unfavorable accounting rules. It was a game to them."

Allario's TV goes on the blink and we head over to a local brew pub to watch Skilling's testimony on their set. Nobody in the place objects when we ask them to turn off the classic rock and crank the volume on CNBC. The details of the deals Skilling is being asked to explain are almost nightmarishly complicated. Allario, though, is riveted to the screen. "This is such compelling TV," he says. "As good as the World Series." Back in Washington, the notoriously quick-tempered Skilling is doing his best to impersonate a sensitive, concerned person. He gets out of one question by relating how the power went out during a crucial meeting. In the corner of the screen, both the Dow and the Nasdaq go from green to red.

"One of the legacies of the Enron debacle," Allario tells me later, "will be how so many smart MBAs drank the Enron Kool-Aid. Listening to Jeff, I'm falling for it again. I want to take another sip." He thinks for a while about the better times at Enron, about the Promethean free-market ambitions of all those young executives. "We set ourselves apart," he says. "We were for free thinking. For doing something good." Enron lived to open new markets in previously unimagined areas. "We could commoditize anything," Allario continues. "Water, paper, air freight capacity, weather, computer chips, ad space on TV."

Again and again during my stay in Houston I am told--by TV commentators, by business magazines, by former Enronians in whatever state of outrage--that what did the company in was greed. That Enron's true mission was a glorious one, that deregulation is a noble goal, but that greed in the upper echelons got in the way. Obviously, there is considerable truth to this. After all, Andrew Fastow, Michael Kopper and the rest of the clever Enron financiers received many millions of dollars as compensation for running the partnerships that inflated Enron's numbers and ultimately destroyed the company. And other top Enron executives were promised royal bonuses when the company's shares hit a certain price target--a clear incentive to do whatever was necessary to make Enron look attractive to Wall Street.

In previous years, though, greed was regarded as the fuel that drove Enron's spectacular intervention in so many different markets. Way back in 2000, Gary Hamel identified the opportunity that Enron executives had to indulge in what he quaintly called "personal wealth accumulation" as a critical element of the company's success. And for Hamel--for nearly everyone in the New Economy amen corner--that was perfectly OK, if not downright virtuous. The great myth of the 1990s was the fundamental decency of capitalist motivations. Free markets were democracy at its finest. CEOs were men of the people, lovable friends of rich and poor alike. The disappearance of job security and labor unions was "free agency." Even the endless cycles of obsolescence and destruction and ruin were something creative, something cool. Only when such destruction threatens to derail the stock market and discredit the entire New Economy does the moral turpitude of top management become an issue. Only then do the Aquinases of business journalism discover the fine distinctions between sensitivity to incentives and base greed.

However spectacular its effects, the wreck of Enron is a far more ordinary matter than such moralizing makes it appear. This is not the result of sin; this is the way markets work. It is simply what happens when regulatory oversight is systematically shut down, bought off and defunded; when business journalism becomes salesmanship; when investment banking becomes salesmanship; and when political power is a prize that goes to the highest bidder. There can be little doubt that the kind of microscopic scrutiny that Enron is now undergoing would uncover similar accounting and compensation scandals at many other companies in America. And it is well-known that industry lobbyists routinely craft the legislation that is supposed to regulate their industries. Credit-card lobbyists write the bankruptcy laws; broadcasting lobbyists write the telecommunications laws. It's not because they're greedy, it's because they can.

These are mistakes that the country seems determined to repeat every few decades or so. In the early 1930s the Senate Banking Committee performed a long investigation of Wall Street's practices during the just-ended bull market, and many of the shenanigans they unearthed seem straight out of the Enron playbook: lucrative options deals for insiders, dummy corporations set up to disguise liabilities, friendly politicians, financial institutions using their own endlessly rising stock to secure questionable deals and, of course, the rampant transformation of investment bankers into salesmen. (One critical difference: That time, the mighty men of Wall Street, concerned about their industry's reputation, actually testified.)

Years after those revelations, Ferdinand Pecora, the committee's counsel, wrote about the small investor who was surprised to find all of this going on, who had somehow believed that everything on Wall Street was regulated, overseen, safe: "He has reckoned without the ingenuity of the legal technicians and the complaisance of governmental authorities toward powerful financial and business groups during the lamented pre-New Deal era." Nor was this malign ingenuity--what the Enron brass called "creativity"--finally extirpated by the 1930s reforms. "Under the surface of the governmental regulation of the securities market," Pecora warned, "the same forces that produced the riotous speculative excesses of the 'wild bull market' of 1929 still give evidences of their existence and influence." Such corruption wasn't merely the product of individual greed; it was a force of free-market nature, and it would reassert itself by default if we didn't remain vigilant.

And, of course, we didn't. (And we won't, either, if Dubya has his way.) Amid a frenzy of New Economy exuberance we came to believe that the rules had been somehow suspended. That only if we left markets free to do their special thing would we ever achieve real economic democracy. In life Enron was hailed as the great exemplar of this bankrupt idea; so it should be in death as well.

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