The bidding war between Verizon and Qwest for MCI is based on a myth of scarcity. That is, both think they can make the deal pay by squeezing customers for the scarce resources represented by the MCI network.

Moores Law of Fiber rendered that inoperative many years ago. There is no shortage of fiber backbone capacity. And there are ample replacements for Plain Old Telephone Service -- not just cable but wireless.

The myth on which this deal is based is, simply, untrue.

Yet the myth persists, and not just in the telecommunications business.

In the news business, we have Phil Anschutz creating newspapers and PBS being pushed to the political right based on the same scarcity myth. There's only one newspaper, there is only one PBS, so if we control it with our politics people will have to think what we tell them to think.

Nonsense. There is no scarcity of outlets for either local or national news. You're reading this, aren't you?

The same scarcity myth has long underlain the FCC's regulation of broadcast content. The FCC regulates what is broadcast only because there is a limited frequency spectrum, thus limited choice in each market. Without that myth all content regulation is a direct violation of the First Amendment.

And it is a myth. Moore's Law of Radios proves it. Cellular telephony proves it. Frequencies can be re-used, and transmit far more than we once thought. The resource is, in fact, practically unlimited.

(Of course genius, as in this picture called Scarcity by Saul Lishinsky, is always in short supply. From The New Deal Network.)

Yet politicians on both sides persist in believing these myths. We insist on believing there is scarcity in food, when there isn't. We act like there's a scarcity of energy. There isn't. We just haven't figured out how to efficiently harness the energy that's all around us.

I think Isaac Asimov's story Nightfall provides an answer as to why this is so. Written at the start of a career legendary for its output, it tells the story of a society that destroyed itself every 10,000 years, every time all its suns went into eclipse and people realized how infinite the universe actually is.

All efforts at controlling the mind are subject to this myth of scarcity. Try to control education and smart kids learn to reject you. Try to control the Internet and Chinese people learn just how precious a sip of freedom is, while the rest of us get bored by the firehose.

Freedom is the answer to tyranny because freedom creates abundance, or discovers the abundance that is in fact all around us.

To all those who feel oppressed, no matter their cause, I hope this brings some comfort. In the end, freedom will win out. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in your lifetime, but it will. Freedom, knowledge, and truth are all plastic, all powerful, and all unlimited.

The universe, whether we're talking about your mind, this planet, or the stars themselves, is far more infinite than you or I can possibly know.

And the only way to get a taste of it is to open your mind, as scientists do, and prepare always to have it changed.