LIMITED GOOD THING

Among Enron’s sins has been its campaign toward headlong deregulation of the energy industry. The company lobbied at the national and state levels to turn energy into a commodity that it could buy and sell in its single-minded drive to build profits out of trading rather than from production. Nationally, it used lavish campaign contributions to influence Congress and the White House. And Curtis L. Hebert Jr. says that Kenneth Lay, then Enron’s chairman and chief executive, telephoned him early last year to say that he would support him for retention as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission only if he dropped his reservations about electricity deregulation. (Mr. Lay denied the story.) Mr. Hebert says he refused, and he soon lost his job.

On the state level, Enron paid out $1.9 million to 700 politicians in 28 states in 1998 and 2000. Twenty-four of them passed some form of deregulation. (Maine was one of them, but its state lawmakers got a total of only $700 from Enron.)

Deregulation in general got a big push from President Reagan’s promise to “get government off our backs.” Politicians and much of the general public accepted it as an unmitigated Good Thing. The national telephone monopoly was broken up. Federal control of airline rates and schedules ended. Energy went from regulated monopolies to a supposedly competitive market system that has worked less well than promised and went wildly out of control in California. In some cases, prices fell in deregulated markets but worsening service suggests customers sometimes were paying in a different way.

While some publications continue to denounce the “beltway” culture as automatically bad and free markets as automatically good, the terror attacks of Sept. 11 have reminded many Americans that big government can be a protector as well as a tyrant. And the Enron collapse has shown that more and better regulation of securities trading and the big accounting firms might at least have alerted employees and stockholders that the big company was rotten at the core.

It is too much to expect any general reversal of deregulation. The jumble of competing telephone companies, the erratic schedules and fares of an airline industry that has suffered an enormous number of bankruptcies – even the unpredictable pricing of electricity – are probably here to stay.

But we surely can look forward to new government protection against secretive “aggressive accounting,” against forcing employees to fill their 401(k) portfolios with their employers’ stock and against lockdowns that prevent employees from selling their stock while a company’s executives enrich themselves by selling out. A little re-regulation in these areas would be a Good Thing for those who lost under the last Good Thing.