Cheater, Cheater

"As economic inequalities have deepened during the last several decades, the renewed worship of money has bred temptation at all levels. Executives at Enron, Worldcom and other corporations, intoxicated by the heady atmosphere of deregulation, defraud shareholders of billions and get away with little or no punishment. The little guy naturally says: If the big shots get away with it, why not me? So he cheats on his taxes, steals from his company and downloads music without paying for it.
These may be trivial matters, but Callahan believes they are symptomatic of a deeper disease in the body politic. The infection takes hold as early as high school or college (cheating is rampant on campus), feeding (and feeding on) the conviction that success in life requires cutting moral corners, that success is ultimately defined in monetary terms. Consequently, our public life is pervaded by corruption and hypocrisy.
Callahan is a good enough sociologist to know that this charge requires specific grounding: If one defines cheating as breaking the rules to get ahead (as he does), then it matters who is making the rules as well as who is breaking them. Deregulation has made many unethical practices technically legal, such as those that pervade the credit card industry: deceptive advertising, usurious rates, hidden fees, excessive penalties. Free-market fundamentalism conceals a multitude of sins.
Callahan also is a good enough historian to understand how we got to this perilous state. The flaunting of ill-gotten gains during the first Gilded Age provoked the broad moral concern of turn-of-the-century progressive reformers. They laid the foundations for the American version of the welfare state, which came into being during the New Deal and framed public discourse throughout the post-World War II decades. Corporations had struck an implicit social compact with labor unions, trading job security for acceptance of work rules, and loyalty to their employees and their community in exchange for a steady supply of skilled workers.
By the ’80s that compact was broken, and the only constituencies recognized by corporate executives were their shareholders and themselves. The unleashing of turbo-capitalism under Ronald Reagan brought with it a privatization of public morality. Government became less concerned with curtailing corporate malfeasance than with policing personal behavior. For the new breed of moral reformer, marijuana was more alarming than toxic waste."