At last, we have some CEOs under arrest in the great Wall Street Robbery. The Rigas of Adelphia have been busted and face wire fraud, mail fraud and other charges that should be visited on all the other boardroom crooks the last 30 years have spawned.
Apologists on the right will say that they merely took Adam Smith's rules too far. That markets work, that competition is morally good, and these guys don't represent the majority of hard-working, right living, pure-thinking business executives currently blessing the American landscape.
Crap.
The problem lies in the fact that Adam Smith is usually misread, misinterpreted, and has been surpassed as an economic thinker (not his fault as he has been dead a couple of centuries). Far better that these CEOs followed John Nash -- but of course, B-schools can't handle innovation at the theoretic level, so they probably only learned of him in the film, "A Beautiful Mind."
The Dick and Jane version of Nash's Governing Dynamics says that the pursuit of one's self-interest can be self-defeating if the greater good is ignored. Or as Russell Crowe explained it in the film: "If we all go after the blonde, we'll look like idiots and she'll ignore us. But if we each separate and go after her friends, we'll all get laid." A sexist remark for which we beg pardon of our female readers.
In other words, the CEO swindle eventually destroys itself by destroying the companies for which these people allegedly worked. Killing the goose that lays the golden options.
Business ethics ultimately devolves to that -- do what is right for your company, and what is right for the client, and what is right for the investors, and what is right for the society of which you are a part. Only then, will you be doing what is in your own self-interest.