If an ad man like Don Draper saw the groveling, apologetic PR coming from big corporations today, Fred Smith thinks hed be appalled.

(SOURCE: CEI) Smith is president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. On Tuesday evening, the group hosted a Mad Men-themed, $250-a-head gala dinner, where they lamented that todays corporations have lost the self-assurance business possessed in the 50s and 60s.

The advertisements of Drapers 1960s were offering the good life, products that allowed us to be healthier, wealthier, Smith told the packed ballroom at Washingtons Hyatt-Regency, standing in front of giant vintage photo of a nuclear family watching TV. These days, Smith continued, modern Mad Men have a rather more dispiriting message for consumers. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, he said, with mock chagrin. They dont say what theyre proud about. Instead, they say theyre not as bad as you think they are. He singled out BP as the exemplar of corporate Americas new era of shame. BP rushes around and asks customers to use less energy, he said. We shouldnt be ashamed of using it! The audiencea 600-strong room of conservatives and libertariansburst into wild applause.

The free-marketeers at the dinner saw themselves as the natural compatriots of Don Draperthe debonair, hard-driving, sometimes ruthless ad man, in the words of Loren Smith, the federal judge who MC-ed the program in a Guys and Dolls-style fedora and gray pinstriped suit. But its not clear whether Draper himself would have agreed.

Certainly, Jon Hamms character has no compunction about glorifying a corporate client amid accusations of harm to the public good. In a recent episode, Draper tells Dow, the chemical giant, how he would contain the backlash over the use of napalm in Vietnam. The government put it in flame-throwers against the Nazis, impact bombs against the Japanese, he tells them. The important thing is, when our boys are fighting and they need it…when America needs it…Dow makes it. And it works.

But Don Draper and his colleagues ultimately care more about the success of their own business than an ideological defense of free-enterprise capitalism. After Lucky Strike decided to dump his firm, Draper pens a vindictive letter published in the New York Times that channels the concerns that every public health-advocate and government regulator that cracked down on the cigarette industry at the time.

For over 25 years we devoted ourselves to peddling a product for which good work is irrelevant, because people cant stop themselves from buying it, he writes. And then, when Lucky Strike moved their business elsewhere, I realized, here was my chance to be someone who could sleep at night, because I know what Im selling doesnt kill my customers.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. But Don Draper doesnt write the letter because he believes the public-health crackdown is justified. He does it because he knows he wont get Lucky Strikes business backand perhaps because it could bring in new business from the likes of the American Cancer Society, as he explains to his colleagues while puffing away at a cigarette.

Likewise, BPs public-relations campaign after the 2010 oil spill didnt mean the company suddenly had a change of heart. It was an image-rehabilitation strategy meant to ensure that BPs business was protected in an era in which both customers and public officials will demand that our energy industry is, in fact, Beyond Petroleum. A mea culpa attitude can also be a pragmatic approach to business in the face of external constraintsbe they limited natural resources or new regulations.

The free-market advocates at CEI, however, dismisses the idea that corporationsor their ad menmust adapt to such constraints. The Malthusian dystopia that liberals warned about in Don Drapers time never came to pass, asserted Matt Ridley, the British author who received an award at the gala. In a video acceptance speech, Ridley listed the previous eras supposed paper tigers, to the audiences amusement: Global famine, food aid, cancer epidemics, nuclear winter…oil spill increases. And American businesses are going through the same charade today, with products walking through a minefield of political correctness, Smith said, bemoaning the ongoing war on sin products. (The galas gift bags each containing a cigar, ash tray, highball glasses, and candy cigarettesdrove his point home.)

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