Anyone interested in teaching ethics to their children should have them read Holman Jenkins’ op-ed page piece “Internet Pioneer meets The Telecom Wars,” in today’s Wall Street Journal. It is a perfect example of the “ends justify the means” mantra that made the managers of Enron, and ImClone, and Worldcom think the rules didn’t apply to them. Here is why he is wrong.

Jenkins argues people should stop picking in MCI because they are so technologically advanced--they have plans to move long-distance traffic to the Internet within two years. And because a really great guy—Vint Cerf, inventor of TCP/IP protocol—works there.

“Say what you will about Bernie Ebbers, the Worldcom impresario,” Jenkins writes, “but at least he gave his ill-starred baby the world’s most advanced and globe-straddling telecommunications network.”

“MCI’s use of creative accounting to minimize the huge access changes paid to local phone operators,” (italics mine), the billion dollar fraud claim announced last week, is justified to Jenkins because he thinks the access charges are a bad idea anyway. The fact that all this creative accounting and minimizing violates the law does not seem to bother him.

Along the way, he spares no rhetorical trick to paint MCI’s competitors as the evil force holding back progress. They are using “chutzpah and moral obtuseness” to drive MCI out of business. They “extort access fees,” and engage in “accounting fiction.” They are only pretending they will make new fiber-to-the-home investments to dupe regulators. They will surely go broke.

“Don’t hold back the industry’s most forward-looking company now”, Jenkins tells us.

The implication seems to be that we should weigh the value of the cool stuff that MCI will produce and balance it against the moral and ethical damage they have done, like the scale in some great capitalist butcher shop. But that’s not how ethics and standards work. They come first. They are not for sale. Trading ethics for rhetoric and technology is a bad trade.

Many people associate Jenkins’ flawed “the end justifies the means” logic with Niccolo Machiavelli. A careful reading, however, shows that Machiavelli was not advocating such base behavior. His objective was to explore how to govern different types of principalities, in The Prince, and republics, in his earlier classic Discourses on Livy, and to determine the conditions under which a principality might be able to develop into a stable republic. Machiavelli referred to one such type as a corrupt republic, a situation where corrupt leaders have been in control for so long that their behavior has permeated the entire organization.

Machiavelli’s advice on how best to govern a corrupt republic? You can’t. It simply won’t work.

Unfortunately, the Thornburgh and McLucas reports filed in bankruptcy court paint a vivid picture of a corrupt republic in practice.

The people of MCI don’t need a new chief executive or a new financial officer. They need a new management team and a new culture. The only way that is likely to happen is to remove the corporate head and allow the people and assets to find new homes in businesses that follow the rules. That will be painful. And it may mean we have to be a little more patient for the cool technology Jenkins writes about. But it’s the right thing to do.