WHY DOES THE SILENCE PERSIST ABOUT RIGHT-TO-WORK STATUS?

Why the silence about the RIGHT TO WORK legal status of Arkansas ... Governor Clinton's major asset (along with low wages and high productivity) in attracting industry and jobs from Missouri and others. Ask the people in Caruthersville and Kennett about the advantage this gives Arkansas when they compete for new industries.

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BOOK REVIEW:

"RESTORATION"

--by George F. Will

(The Free Press, $19.95).

This is a timely, thoughtful argument that LIMITING THE TERMS of our national legislators is not to punish our increasingly disreputable Congress but to restore that institution to its proper, necessary place as a deliberative body on a par with, or superior to, the presidency and the courts. Legislative careerism is ultimately incompatible with American democracy. Lawmakers must have incentives beyond staying in office. The unstated deal with an ever-growing group of supplicants: You help us win, and we will help you get money and favors. Congress is debased by this porkly process. Term limits would enable Congress to shape public opinion instead of pandering to polls and pleaders.

Excerpt: "Term limitation is a simple, spare reform to alter the incentives that are relevant to entry into, and behavior while in, public life. The absence of term limits is a temptation to legislative careerism. Term limitation is an accommodation to the hard facts of human nature.

Twelve years ago I would have argued against term limitations ... but today I'm a supporter. We've left the days of citizen legislators, both statewide and nationally.

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Two months ago I felt that ROSS PEROT'S re-entry in the presidential race would hurt President Bush more than it would help. Today I think it helps more than it hurts. Why? Because BUSH has run one of the poorest campaigns for the presidency in my memory. His ads have been unfocused and too rapid fire (though his most recent ones are better). He has a case to make but hasn't made it yet.

The Perot entry will shake up the puzzle and many people might refocus on who the next president of the U.S. will be. It's important that they do.

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WILL HE

FOLLOW THROUGH?

George Bush's speech at the Detroit Economic Club recently provides the rhetorical foundation for reviving his moribund campaign. If the President sticks to and enhances the speech's themes, he will beat Clinton. If not, the Governor wins.

The address was a remarkable outline of radical reform. Bush sounded more like a Reagan-Kemp populist than a laid-back, country club conservative. He talked of almost doubling the size of the economy by early in the next century, which would effect a growth rate of old-time Japanese proportions. Such an expansion is impossible without capital, hence the need for a capital gains tax reduction. As he put it, "When capital is taxed lightly, there is more of it and when it is taxed heavily, it becomes scarce--available only to those who are already wealthy, who need it least of all. If capital were more abundant, labor would be more in demand, wages would rise, unemployment lines would shrink."

Bush's idea of negotiating free-trade agreements with a number of countries in Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe was imaginative. Not only would such deals shore up budding democracies, they would force Western Europe and Japan to reduce internal barriers. Billions of consumers would benefit.

He linked this doubling of the economy to the need for reforming schools, coming up with an alarming statistic in favor of ending government's near monopoly on education: "In Chicago 46% of public school teachers send their children to private schools."

He touched on a number of other visionary reforms for inner cities, health care, pensions and our legal system.

The President must not drop this theme of achieving robust economic growth primarily through less taxation. He must continue to say again and again how breaking his tax pledge was a mistake that he won't repeat but that his opponent will.

--Malcom Forbes