The Week

■ The Farcical Trade Commission has ruled that Marcel Bic cannot purchase the American Safety Razor Co. and compete with Schick and Gillette, on grounds that the purchase would harm competition by removing one of Bic’s competitors. If you can make any sense of that, you have a swell career waiting for you in Washington. Bring a Bic to flick with the FTC slicks who nixed Bic’s pick for a quick click against Gillette and Schick.

■ Mr. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, stood before a New York City town meeting devoted to the subject of welfare reform and listened indignantly to the charge, brought by a community worker, that a Work Incentive program for welfare mothers had spent most of its funds on “trainers, not people.” Nothing short of a “cross-pollination of computers,” said Mr. Califano darkly, should be resorted to in the interests of reducing the incidence of error in making welfare payments, of taking “the profit out of poverty.” Mr. Califano has had it impressed upon him of late that Indigence, Inc. is indeed a serious problem: the chief investigator of HEW resigned recently after Califano upbraided him for not having sought clearance from the top for an investigation of a health-care delivery company in California, most of whose funds come from Medicaid and Medicare and whose owner is accused of drawing a comfortable $145,000 in salary and of charging inflated expenditures to the Federal Government. Califano, said the former investigator, told him (in private) that he did not wish to have HEW personnel harassing “a bunch of innocent people.”

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■ The Farcical Trade Commission has ruled that Marcel Bic cannot purchase the American Safety Razor Co. and compete with Schick and Gillette, on grounds that the purchase would harm competition by removing one of Bic’s competitors. If you can make any sense of that, you have a swell career waiting for you in Washington. Bring a Bic to flick with the FTC slicks who nixed Bic’s pick for a quick click against Gillette and Schick.

■ Mr. Joseph A. Califano Jr., Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, stood before a New York City town meeting devoted to the subject of welfare reform and listened indignantly to the charge, brought by a community worker, that a Work Incentive program for welfare mothers had spent most of its funds on “trainers, not people.” Nothing short of a “cross-pollination of computers,” said Mr. Califano darkly, should be resorted to in the interests of reducing the incidence of error in making welfare payments, of taking “the profit out of poverty.” Mr. Califano has had it impressed upon him of late that Indigence, Inc. is indeed a serious problem: the chief investigator of HEW resigned recently after Califano upbraided him for not having sought clearance from the top for an investigation of a health-care delivery company in California, most of whose funds come from Medicaid and Medicare and whose owner is accused of drawing a comfortable $145,000 in salary and of charging inflated expenditures to the Federal Government. Califano, said the former investigator, told him (in private) that he did not wish to have HEW personnel harassing “a bunch of innocent people.”