Ten years ago this month, a book I wrote that questioned the business practices of one of the 20th century's most lionized CEOs, Jack Welch, was reviewed in The New York Times. The review, by a former colleague of mine at The Wall Street Journal, was, much to my chagrin, not favorable. The reviewer ripped into my view that Mr. Welch's profit-at-any-cost mentality -- even if shareholders benefited -- was not good for America in the long run.

"Society functions better," Roger Lowenstein wrote, intoning the free-market mantra of the time, "when companies pursue selfish rewards in the marketplace."

In light of the gargantuan financial mess in which we now find ourselves, extolling the societal virtue of the pursuit of selfish reward seems misplaced, to say the least.

The evisceration of trillions of dollars in stock-market wealth in mere months is the sort of carnage that no ideology can justify or withstand. It rivals in the economic sphere what 9/11 was to national security. And, as the recent election results emphatically demonstrated, it's an ideology that has now been thoroughly rejected at the polls.

The misguided belief in the sanctity of selfishness has come full circle. It's been ruinous for financial markets and the economy, which is why Democrats will soon control, for the first time in 14 years, both houses of Congress as well as the presidency. That, in turn, will change how we govern the economy for the next four years and probably much longer.

Ten years ago, free marketeers like Jack Welch and then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan were deified in business circles. Nearly everyone bought into the gospel of wealth and free markets as it was preached and practiced on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms for the better part of three decades.

Please keep this in mind as your anger rises about having to pick up a $700 billion bar tab for Wall Street's drunken financial plunder. And here's another thing to consider: Are you also a beneficiary of the very thing that enrages you?

As Congress begins to plumb the causes of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, it's clear that there are many culprits in this national and even global whodunit. Anyone who borrowed beyond their means to repay was a participant.

Greed is at the heart of the calamity we are now experiencing -- a pandemic of greed that lasted more than a generation and entrapped many people of diverse persuasions and stations in our society.

Republicans certainly celebrated it, but so did many Democrats (like those who assign book reviews at The New York Times). Lenders were guilty, but so were borrowers. Chief executives drank the Kool-Aid, but so did shareholders.

Everyone figured that the laws of financial common sense no longer applied. As a consumer, piling on more mortgage and credit-card debt didn't matter; as a broker or banker, issuing poor-quality loans didn't matter; as a governor, mayor or president, more borrowing didn't matter. The lesson of the 1980s, Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly told President Bush, was that "deficits don't matter."

Here in Pittsburgh, we have massive new construction projects under way in a city that's broke and deep in debt. They're mostly built with public dollars and, as such, they represent a claim on your future earnings and mine. That should tell you something about the far-reaching causes and consequences of this crisis.

The pandemic nature of the problem was brought home to me years ago in conversations I had with a former Allegheny College professor of mine. The professor, Alfred Kern, once related the story of a cocktail party he'd attended in Pittsburgh's liberal 14th Ward.

It was the sort of setting where you'd least expect to hear gushing admiration of the wonders of the free market, but when the conversation turned to General Electric and Mr. Welch's tenure as the company's CEO, there was universal acclaim for the job he'd done -- and, above all, for the money they'd made on GE stock.

While Mr. Kern and I had profoundly different political views -- me a conservative, he a well-intentioned Ivory Tower liberal -- we found common ground in something that perplexed us both: Why weren't they outraged?

Liberals counted their money and sipped Chablis while GE outsourced and downsized manufacturing and endlessly sent jobs overseas. Mr. Welch -- "Neutron Jack," as he was called then, after the neutron bomb that could slaughter thousands while leaving buildings intact -- invented the strategy. (How would you like that on your tombstone? "Here lies the man who downsized the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers in order to create wealth that he and countless others later lost.")

Why didn't most people object a decade ago? And why do they now?

Because they were being enriched by the cult of selfishness but, now that it's costing them dearly, suddenly they've had an epiphany.

The irony goes deeper in that Mr. Welch expanded by five-fold GE's reliance on financial services. Debt was a great thing, or so it was assumed at the time, as long as the economy kept humming and GE's borrowing goosed its earnings.

But the same financial services Mr. Welch championed are why GE shares have been murdered this year, dropping far more than the Dow, and why Warren Buffett recently made an emergency loan of $3 billion to the company that Thomas Edison created. GE also received loan guarantees last week under a new federal program for hobbled lenders.

These are the facts now, and they don't fit the high free-market theories that Mr. Lowenstein and others espoused a decade ago. Facts are inconvenient. Sometimes, they trump ideology.

People like Mr. Greenspan, the formerly revered Fed chairman, are now hauled before Congress and given a thorough lambasting. It's extraordinary to see how far and how quickly reputations have fallen.

When the new Congress begins sifting through the debris and considers new laws to recover and prevent this from happening again, I hope it exercises restraint and realizes that while we must regulate, we must do so judiciously. Killing risk-taking altogether would be a huge mistake; the rewards it provides to society and individuals are essential to economic growth.

At the same time, our economic course does need to be altered, and the last decade offers lessons. For me, the chief lessons are these:

No matter what apologists said at the time, the titans of capitalism were not the saviors of our economy, as they and most of the media claimed them to be, nor were the ideas they advocated of unfettered free markets our salvation. In their reckless pursuit of profit, massive sins were committed which were not in our society's best interests. And while it is irrefutable that the selfish pursuit of reward will always be present in any capitalistic system, when greed runs amok, societies do not function better.

If you doubt any of the above, I suggest you take a look at the latest statement for your own stock portfolio. October was the worst month for the stock market in 21 years.

Even if Mr. Lowenstein didn't get it a decade ago, I sure hope the rest of us do now.