Thomas Frank: Ayn Rand’s libertarian “Groundhog Day”: Billionaire greed, deregulation and the myth that markets aren’t free enough

Wall Street wrecks the economy, and we keep pretending they're heroes worth emulating. Maybe we really are suckers

I published the following in Harper’s Magazine to mark ten years since the demise of Enron. It was more than an anniversary piece, though: this was the story of our times. The architecture of modern-day corruption never changes and, as every day’s newspaper reminds us, the Age of Enron is still very much alive.

This summer will mark 13 years since the series of disclosures that led to the sudden bankruptcy of the Enron Corp. of Houston. The collapse of the gas-and-power leviathan, then one of the largest companies in the nation, was the starting gun for the modern age of neoliberal scandal, the corporate crime that set the pattern. It was not the first episode to feature grotesque bonuses for insiders, or a fawning press, or bought politicians, or average people being fleeced by scheming predators. But it was the first in recent memory to bring together all those elements in one glorious fireball of fraud.

And in the years since, we’ve seen many more fireballs, each following the Enron pattern and all of them culminating in the financial meltdown of 2008, along with the seemingly unending recession it triggered. It is fair to say that in some genuine, dismaying sense, we are living in the Age of Enron.