The right sees Clinton's affair and cover-up as the symbolic culmination of the Sixties counterculture's moral permissiveness. The left sees the Starr investigation as the latest episode in a recurring American pattern of inquisitorial, hysterical puritanism. THERE is something worse than the wrong moral standards: selective standards.

Emerging from the moral discourse surrounding the twin crises of the moment - the international economic crisis and the impeachment crisis - are the fuzzy outlines of a new, two-tiered morality: a permissive morality promising endless second chances for economic and political elites; a restrictive and punitive code for the rest of us.

Underlying this regressive moral code (moral responsibility lightens as one ascends the socio-economic ladder) is a notion that has been advanced in both crises. Whatever their misjudgments or misconduct, some individuals and some institutions are just too big to fail.

Look at the rationale for the rash of international financial bailouts. Yes, undercapitalized banks in the emerging market economies made bad loans. Yes, their governments egged them on by over-insuring them against risk with implied safety nets. Yes, developed country bankers, investors and speculators ignored economic fundamentals and made imprudent loans, investments and bets.

But, despite their excessive risk-taking, now the taxpayer must lighten their losses and fork over another $18 billion to the IMF. And below-market loans must be extended to, pick one, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Russia, because in an era of global economic interdependence, we cannot afford not to.

Republican market disciplinarians, led by House Majority Leader Dick Armey, along with some on the populist left, have opposed the bailouts. The cause of the bailouts has been the bailouts themselves, said Armey on the House floor. Specifically, they have been caused by the growing assumption on the part of high-flying investors that any groupings of bankruptcies anywhere will be covered in part by American taxpayers.

Subsidize something, and you get more of it, runs a venerable axiom of economics. Cushioning private losses with public funds subsidizes (and invites more) imprudent risk-taking in capital markets. Economists call these artificial incentives for risk-taking moral hazard.

Now, listen closely to the Clinton defenders urging us to put the impeachment crisis behind us and move on. Yes, he perjured himself. Yes, his behavior is indefensible and deserves punishment. But impeachment, even a wide-ranging inquiry, punishes the country by distracting its leader from multiplying international dangers. Our collective fate is so dependent on his individual fate that punishing him is an act of collective masochism.

Sound familiar? It should. Wrapped inside the rhetoric is a latent message: The president of the United States is too big to fail.

Criteria for impeachment are ambiguous, and Clinton's misconduct may not have met them. But the problem with the open-ended argument that Clinton is too big to fail is that it precludes impeachment, no matter what further evidence of presidential misconduct should emerge.

The rise of too-big-to-fail as the elites' rationalization of choice comes at an inopportune moment. Because down the social staircase from the Oval Office and the trading floors - in our courtrooms, schoolrooms and welfare offices - the inverse doctrine, too-disadvantaged-to-succeed, is in retreat. In social policy and public rhetoric, the principle of individual responsibility has been reinforced in recent years, conservative kvetching about moral decline notwithstanding.

Thanks in part to Clinton, the federal entitlement to welfare has been ended, and plunging welfare rolls suggest it's working. Thanks to stiff new sentencing laws, criminals are serving more of their sentences, and crime rates are falling. Clinton's Goals 2000 education bill initially called for ending the destructive practice of social promotion, even if he couldn't sell it in the end to the liberal wing of his party.

The right sees Clinton's affair and cover-up as the symbolic culmination of the Sixties counterculture's moral permissiveness. The left sees the Starr investigation as the latest episode in arecurring American pattern of inquisitorial, hysterical puritanism. For them, this intolerance began with the Salem witch trials - and extended through the Comstock Act, the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy Era.

Both camps are united in seeing this crisis as a battle over the substantive content of our moral standards. But more important, perhaps, than the substantive content of the rules, regulations and laws that we impose on ourselves is a formal characteristic of those standards: neutrality.

In our social policies, we have rediscovered the obvious: The disadvantaged are much like the rest of us; they respond best to rewards for success and penalties for failure. Faced with real stakes, they are not too disadvantaged to succeed. Are the privileged too big to fail? Maybe we need to remind ourselves that they, too, are much like the rest of us. The promise of easy landings for failure perpetuates failure at the top, just like it does at the bottom.

The even-handed neutrality of the law distinguishes modern democracy from the feudalism that preceded it and the totalitarian systems that in this century threatened it. Also known as equality under the law, it is a big idea, too big to fail.