Mergerphobia
The antitrust enforcers in the administration — the folks who, according to Robert Bork, are the only people there who remain devoted to the rule of law — have kept up a steady stream of leaks against the proposed merger between MCI Worldcom and Sprint. Last November, the Washington Post quoted a "knowledgeable source" within the Justice Department who said the merger would probably not be approved. In December, a preliminary Federal Communications Commission memo surfaced in the Post; it was unfavorable to the merger. The memo writer had to take himself off the case after the flap over the story — but the FCC chairman, William Kennard, has made some negative comments about the merger himself. Last week, there was yet another anti-merger leak.

The opposition to the merger is based on the idea that it would increase market concentration in long-distance phone service. But as a Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out last week, that market is beginning to disappear: "All the major carriers, including AT&T, report flat or falling long distance revenues, and it's not because people aren't talking. Those minutes are rapidly migrating to wireless, and soon will be migrating off telephone networks altogether in favor of the Internet." The administration's position is as questionable as its tactics.

Pro-life Prattle
John Gizzi, political editor for Human Events, scored a minor journalistic coup this week by getting a number of prominent social conservatives to announce that they would not support a Bush-Ridge ticket. Phyllis Schlafly, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes, and Bob Dornan all told Gizzi they would walk away. Gizzi even got the chairmen of the California and Nebraska Republican parties to say that selecting Ridge would make them less enthusiastic about Bush.

Does it really make sense for pro-lifers to engage in this sort of public breast-beating? In the first place, Ridge has a better chance of getting on the ticket if people think that the only objection to him is that he favors keeping abortion legal. There are other objections, starting with the fact that he was more likely to vote against Ronald Reagan than with him during his time in the House. The more important consideration is that the pro-life veto should be exercised offstage. Pro-lifers have good reason to want Bush to pick a running mate who shares their views. They have no reason to want him to appear to be doing so under duress.

Individual pro-life leaders, on the other hand, might have an interest in being able to brag that their threats headed off a pro-abortion veep. But that would be awfully cynical.

The Gilder Age
The New Yorker offers a strongly favorable profile of supply-side prophet George Gilder, written by Larissa MacFarquhar, in its current issue. It reveals Gilder to be quirky — he believes in ESP and is so absent-minded he once turned over a bowl full of soup at a fancy restaurant to determine its provenance — and also uncomfortable with his fame as a technology-stock picker. He wishes the thousands of people who read his newsletter for hot tips were also familiar with the ideas on capitalism and entrepreneurship advanced in his influential book Wealth and Poverty (which made NR's recent list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century).

MacFarquhar offers several glimpses into the man's deeply conservative mind. Here's one: "More than anything, Gilder is a romantic. Not only does he despise materialism; he also disdains rationality and calculation. Genius, to him, is to be found in intuitive, irrational leaps; in flashes of insight whose origins cannot be traced; in risks so bold that their outcomes cannot possibly be predicted. Human creativity, he believes, will flourish as long as minds remain open to chance, intuition, and mystery; it will wither when people imagine that they must proceed by empirical and logical means alone."