Sears bankruptcy is capitalism at work

In 1817, not long after the once-great emperor Napoleon met his Waterloo, poet Percy Shelley wrote a few lines on the impermanence of power. He pictured a ruined statue in a wind-swept desert with an inscription barely legible among the broken pieces: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

The empires we build in the United States are called corporations. But the same lesson applies. Nothing – least of all power and dominion – lasts forever.