"Don't trust anyone over 30," was the mantra of youth 40 years ago.

		JoAnn Chirico teaches sociology at the Beaver campus of Penn State University, jxc64@psu.edu.

Those teenagers and twentysomethings now in their 50s and 60s still don't trust anyone, not in public life. No one does. We don't trust lawyers, politicians, journalists, clergy, police, business leaders or sales people.

Most of us don't even trust the president.

Not only do we not trust; we don't even expect that we should be able to. It seems naive and horribly gauche if someone actually shows surprise at the newest betrayal of confidence. Our wounds have turned gangrenous.

In the 1960s and '70s, it became evident that institutions weren't working in the ways that were promised. People could work hard and never "make it."

Housewives living the "American Dream" in the suburbs found themselves waking up in the nightmare of "Valley of the Dolls." Kids were going to school but by the 1980s achievement levels had slipped to mediocre in comparisons with other nations. Cars were sold by an iconic corporation whose executives knew a certain model would explode in rear-end collisions. Air pollution choked us.

Love Canal and Three Mile Island were harsh reminders that modern technologies could sicken or kill us.

Ironically, the seemingly benign ethic on which the institutions of our very modern society is based -- calculation of the most efficient means to achieve ends -- became the source of institutional malaise. Calculation demands that quality is reduced to quantity. The "means to end" rationale results in the bottom line dictating action. Each, upon scrutiny, is nonsensical. Together, they are deadly.

Take the quality/quantity mutation. We put a price or number on everything. We calculate the value of a life when we assign a benefit to survivors. We test children, assign them numbers and school them based on the figures. We calculate a value for labor, what an hour of labor is worth and whose labor is worth more. We are defined from birth by a series of measures, our IQ, our grades, our income, our credit rating, our net worth, our weight and our body mass index.

The best example of bottom-line dynamics is the profit motive. Corporate ethics dictate that a corporation's first responsibility is to make profit.

Bending rules as a means to the larger more important end, seems justifiable.

Determining how far rules can bend before they break becomes elusive. It's easy for lying to become the norm. This moral drift has eroded political life as well.

When ends are used to justify the means in calculations that reduce quality to quantity, results can be deadly. This is what happened with the now famous exploding Pintos. Ford calculated the cost of insurance settlements for loss of life, injury and car damages. They figured it was cheaper to settle claims than refit the car with rubber bladders, preventing the explosions.

Conservative estimates are that 500 people needlessly burned to death.

Hundreds of lives are lost yearly because workplace codes are violated to save money. Consumer products sold without adequate concern for safety in relation to profit cost hundreds more. Over and over, life is calculated as less than, not even remotely equal to, profit -- or a share of CEO salary.

In addition to the direct cost of death, there is lot of "collateral damage."

Layoffs and low wages are two ways to increase profits. They are also the most common causes of family dissolution. They result in mental illness, reduced school achievement and poor physical health. The primary victims are children. As the Bush administration looks for ways to save families, they should look first to a guaranteed living wage and full employment.

It doesn't have to be like this. The most prominent example in this regard is Jim Sinegal of Costco. He has upended the traditional institutional model.

He maintains a rigid adherence to values without regard to costs. He pays every worker the most that he can afford to pay, in salary and benefits. Every price is as low as he can make it; a rigid markup limit is maintained. He pays himself a modest salary. He figures, if you do good things, "good things will happen." Even when profits were down, he didn't cut employee salary or benefits. Coincidentally, in 2004, with 28 percent fewer stores, Costco outsold Wal-Mart by 21 percent. While Wal-Mart's earnings were pretty flat, Costco's were up 34 percent.

With Sinegal's motto, "just do good things," lying, cheating and hiding find little quarter in a corporate or political ethos. When the means are ends in themselves, values are pushed into the foreground.

Periodically, every nation needs to remind itself what its values are. Like Watergate, the slow unraveling of lies may undermine the Bush administration.

From "I cannot tell a lie," Washington and "honest Abe," truth has been paramount in our national identity. We need to remind ourselves what every schoolchild knows: Values count. Lying is not OK.