THE current debauched state of political discourse is illustrated in microcosm by the debate over antitrust enforcement. Time and again, I have found myself in conversation with conservatives about cases brought by the current administration; the consensus is invariably that the cases against, for instance, Microsoft and Visa/MasterCard are wrongheaded. These folk, to be sure, know very little about antitrust policy or the principles that guide it; what they think they do know is that the Clinton Department of Justice is thoroughly corrupt, and that the Antitrust Division is the most corrupt of all. I have heard and read that Joel Klein, the former division head, was merely advancing his career at the expense of heroes of free enterprise, that the judge who decided against Microsoft (a Reagan appointee, by the way) is a toady for the Justice Department, that the cases are nothing more than payoffs to trial lawyers or to Vernon Jordan, and that the companies that complained of Microsoft’s and Visa/ MasterCard’s tactics are whining losers in the competitive marketplace. The true conservative position, it appears, is that antitrust is always Big Government trying to crush individual initiative and success.
Now I take a back seat to no one in my detestation of Bill Clinton, who would, in a well-ordered society, long ago have been hung upside down in a dungeon. But uneducated attacks on antitrust—
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