In the wake of the Enron collapse, Bush Administration officials were congratulating themselves for doing nothing to avert the collapse, and indeed were describing it as a vindication of the free market system. Economic advisor Larry Lindsay called the debacle a "tribute to American capitalism" and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made the point even more fulsomely. "Companies come and go," he said. "Part of the genius of capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions, and they get to pay the consequence or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions. That's the way the system works."

As even Business Week and Fortune pointed out, it wasn't exactly the moment for bromides about the genius of capitalism -- particularly since the people who had made the bad decisions at Enron weren't the ones who were paying most of the consequences. But Lindsay and O'Neill didn't intend to sound callous -- rather their remarks showed just how reflexive this sort of rhetoric has become among free-market zealots. It's not just the way they greet each corporate collapse as a triumph of capitalism, but the fact that they mention capitalism at all. Fifteen or twenty years ago, free-market partisans would have been more likely to say, "that's how our free enterprise system works."

Capitalism has never been a dirty word, exactly. But it has always had a polemical tone, ever since it was given its modern sense by socialist writers in the mid-nineteenth century. The phrase "free enterprise" was invented by economists about a hundred years ago in order to dispel the noxious images that had grown up around capitalism -- bloated plutocrats, workers bent over their machines, strikebreakers, and the rest. "Free enterprise" wears its ideology on its sleeve. It suggests a connection between political freedom and the right to go about your business without the meddlesome interference of bureaucrats -- by the way, that was another word that acquired its pejorative sense around then. And in place of predatory monopolists like Carnegie and Rockefeller who were giving capitalism a bad name, "free enterprise" conjures up the plucky young entrepreneurs of the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger.

For most of the twentieth century, "free enterprise" was the homey, chamber-of-commerce name for capitalism. There's a chair of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas at Austin, a Center for Free Enterprise at the University of South Florida, a Dr. Pepper Free Enterprise Institute in Waco, and a Free Enterprise Leadership Conference held every year by the Jesse Helms center in Wingate, North Carolina. And the word capitalism doesn't appear at all in the Web pages of the Horatio Alger Society, a group that honored Kenneth Lay a couple of years ago for, as they put it, "helping young people to . . . value the opportunities presented by AmericaÌs free enterprise system."

Still, capitalism has always had some defenders who weren't reticent about calling it by its given name, particularly the disciples of Ayn Rand and of libertarian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Hayek, and Milton Friedman. They tend to be people who come to the defense of capitalism with something more like religious zeal. You could hear some of that in the profession of faith that Kenneth Lay made to an interviewer a while ago: "I believe in God and I believe in free markets," he said, and went on to suggest that Jesus would have agreed with him. Needless to say, that level of enthusiasm changes the tone of the discussion. When people extol the virtues of free enterprise, they usually invoke the rising standard of living and the inventions it spawns. When they talk about the virtues of capitalism they're more likely to go on about the moral values of individualism and the freedom to fail that capitalism provides -- the lesson that both O'Neill and Lindsay were quick to read in the Enron disaster. It's a little scrap of bombast you can trace directly back to Ayn Rand's turgid philosophizing -- the notion that capitalism is never so glorious as when it's strewing the ground with bodies. (Free-market zealots also like to use Schumpeter's description of capitalism as "creative destruction," though they usually elide Schumpeter's conclusion that capitalism would wind up by destroying itself.)

There was a time when this kind of talk was considered irresponsible by the respectable free-marketeers who were earnestly promoting the virtues of free enterprise over socialism and the welfare state. But after the the fall of communism and the freewheeling markets of the nineties, capitalism is back, and "free enterprise" has started to sound a little musty. It's gotten to where the word capitalism was probably as frequent inside the ballrooms at the World Economic Forum in New York as it was on the signs of the demonstrators in the street.

What's odd is that the right's reclamation of the word capitalism hasn't extended to its cousin capitalist. Forbes magazine tried to reclaim that word a while ago when it started billing itself as a "capitalist tool," but capitalist is still in the closet, at least when it comes to using it as a job description. People talk about "capitalist societies" or "capitalist economies," and you can describe somebody as a "venture capitalist," which really just a derivative of "venture capital." But Forbes and the Wall Street Journal don't ever apply the c-word to people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or Rupert Murdoch. Those are investors, entrepreneurs, moguls, or simply businessmen. Reading the business press, you might conclude that America has finally realized the dream of building capitalism without capitalists, -- that we're free at last from that rapacious class that once held the economy at its mercy. There's no one left to blame; as Secretary O'Neill observed, that's just the way the system works.

return to pieces on 9/11 etc.