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In the midst of the various corporate accounting scandals this past summer, I came across an old Doonesbury cartoon in which a prison chaplain counsels a white-collar felon, a former corporate executive.

Trying to instill an elementary sense of ethics, the chaplain asks, "What is the opposite of wrong?"

The man replies, "Poor."

This idea is reminiscent of the complaint of Elihu, Job's sometime friend and sometime tormentor, in Job 36:21: "Beware of turning to evil, which you seem to prefer to affliction."

The crisis in corporate America that has shattered investor faith and rocked the markets was not, I think, brought about by an insufficiency of laws; rather, it was brought about by inattention to righteousness. Corporate executives, pressed to meet their financial targets, and investors, obsessed with short-term gains, made choices at every turn. Too often they chose evil over affliction, or, in Gary Trudeau's terms, chose to be wrong rather than poor.

It is against this backdrop that it is most useful to consider the Supreme Court's narrow decision on school vouchers this past June. The court, in a case involving a voucher program in Cleveland, allowed the government to provide some measure of financial relief for poor parents who choose to send their children to private schools, including religious schools.

Although attacked by liberal critics, the ruling may actually help shape the morality of the rising generation of young Americans. These are the people who will be running America—in particular, corporate America—three or four decades in the future.

When Americans gaze into that future, what they see unsettles them. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (on whose advisory board I sit) recently released a depressing survey: a stunning 76 percent of respondents stated that young people do not have as strong a sense of right and wrong as they did half a century ago. This is not just the sentiment of an aging generation. Well into the 1960s, Americans were more likely to agree than disagree with the view that young people of their day were every bit as moral as in the past.

Consider once more the problem with the markets. Put simply, investors no longer trust the numbers that firms churn out. Without clear, believable numbers, there is no reliable basis for investing, for no one seems quite sure whether any company is doing as well as it claims. Without a high degree of trust, markets cannot function properly. In particular, the raising of new capital—the thing that free markets are supposed to do best—becomes expensive if not impossible. No integrity, we might say, equals no money.

Which leads us back to vouchers. The Supreme Court has (quite correctly, in my judgment) lifted the unpersuasive constitutional bar to giving families tuition money to use at the private schools of their choice. Now the battle over school funding will return to the legislatures, where it should have been to begin with. Some states will no doubt adopt broad voucher plans, and swiftly. Others will respond more cautiously. A few will bar the gates, thinking, perhaps, that the religious barbarians are approaching.

This diversity of responses is just what one should expect (and cherish) in a nation with as many different ideas of the good as America, in its richness, has been blessed to possess. But what the survey data teach us, if the corporate scandals hadn't already pointed the way, is that Americans have had enough of policies aimed merely at churning out smart people. We need, desperately, policies that churn out good people.

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November 18 2002, Vol. 46, No. 12