Washington ? Having helped to promote the dot.com bubble during the past decade, the media seem to have embarked on a scorched-earth policy. It is not just that American business is, as they say, in a period of adjustment; business itself is now under siege. Public regard for the private sector is at an all-time low, polls tell us; thinkers of great thoughts question the future of capitalism.

The twenty-something dot.com billionaires are gone, back to graduate school to get their masters in psychology. Companies that were once models of evolutionary progress are now revealed as figments of accountants’ imagination. The CEOs who stalked the planet now sit and listen to lectures from senators. There was less to vertical integration, it would seem, than met the eye. Synergy, yesterday’s buzzword, is in disrepute; so, for that matter, is the concept of buzzwords.

Things have gotten so bad that the face of American business is no longer a bald corporate titan Jack Welch, Kenneth Lay, Ronald Perelman but Martha Stewart, the omnimedia goddess now caught in an insider-trading debacle.

And as Martha Stewart would say, this is a Good Thing. The economy is not so much adjusting for inflation as adjusting for reality. The dot.com revolution in business was always dangerously oversold, and the markets lost their moorings in the process. Entrepreneurs seemed to be graduating from lemonade stands to corporate headquarters designed by I.M. Pei, with nothing in between. Financiers who would haggle over the price of a necktie showered untold millions on dubious propositions. Investors lost interest in people who made things and put their faith and money in people who rearranged things.

While the manufacturing sector wilted, the “conceptual” sector (to use Alan Greenspan’s term) printed money that, like any artificial currency, was bound to collapse in the fullness of time.

Why is this a Good Thing? For two reasons, mainly. The dot.com bubble was no different from the overselling of any technological innovation in American history. The headlong growth of railroads led to a series of panics and depressions in the late 19th century. The financial distortion of radio precipitated the 1929 Crash. This is not to say that railroads and radio were not important, or their impact imperceptible. It is to say, however, that when technology shakes the foundation of economies it also distorts the vision of the market. Investors inevitably exaggerate the potential of new technology, and fear to miss the flight when the markets take off.

At some point, both radio and railroads reached critical mass, and their overblown investment balloons returned to earth. The same may be said for the world of the Internet: It has changed the way business gets done, for sure, but not quite swept everything else before it.

The other Good Thing is that the collapse of the dot.com bubble has halted, temporarily, the personality cult of the CEO. The scandals that currently dominate the headlines Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, ImClone, etc. merely reflect what has always been known: That businessmen like making nothing better than money, and when the supply is threatened, will do nearly anything to postpone the day of reckoning.

There is nothing wrong with making lots of money I would like to make lots myself or building a company from nothing into something. But commercial achievement should not be confused with success in life.

Today’s young entrepreneur would be better off studying the life and works of Arthur “Spud” Melin, who died this past week at 77. In the late 1940s he and a classmate from the University of Southern California founded a venture called Wham-O, which, in the course of the next several decades, identified needs Americans didn’t suspect they had. It was Wham-O that invented and marketed such phenomena as the Hula-Hoop, the Frisbee, the SuperBall and Silly String all of which sold in the untold hundreds of millions. There was no synergy involved, or proprietary content, or business model; just a knowledge of the public’s weakness for novelty and conviction that there is nothing more important than getting rich.

Philip Terzian is the associate editor of the Providence Journal.