Robert Reich's politics are not mine, but I find him a consistently interesting read. Two fascinating facts from his latest post: China -- yes, China -- lost 15 percent of its manufacturing jobs between 1995 and 2002. And, "A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in 1967." That's dynamism for you.

One of the lesser-known and most significant facts about the news business these days is that Yahoo! News attracts nearly twice the Web traffic of NYTimes.com. It's a fact that my friend Eric Singer, manager of the Congressional Effect Fund, has urged me to capitalize on by devoting some critical attention to the Yahoo! News site, which is where a lot of young people get their news.

The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore has an article that begins: "With each passing week that the assault against global capitalism continues in Washington, I become more nostalgic for one missing voice: Milton Friedman's." It's a well-executed piece and well-worth reading, but on the other hand, isn't one of the things missed about Friedman that he wouldn't have sat around in the middle of a great crisis moaning about how much he missed Adam Smith or David Ricardo or some other figure from a previous generation? "Nostalgic" is the right word. It's hard to see how this line of argument will really resonate with the Obama generation, which could use a Milton Friedman or two of its own.

An editorial -- or "leader," as the Brits call it -- in the latest issue of the Economist weighs in on a lot of the issues this Web site is concerned with, reminding readers that "America's free-market capitalism has always been a model for the rest of the world" and warning that President Obama and Congress "risk overreaching."

President Clinton is now complaining about what he sees as a lack of activity by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Interviewed for an article in the New York Times magazine coming out this weekend, Mr. Clinton refers to the Bush administration as "eight years where we would not have an S.E.C. for most of the time."

It wasn't for lack of trying by the SEC. As this New York Sun article points out, the SEC tried to broaden its reach by regulating hedge funds and imposing new rules on mutual funds, but in each case was rejected by federal courts. In other instances, as this Sun editorial reported, the SEC went after hedge funds with expansive and burdensome document requests as part of what seemed to be fishing expeditions.

Senators Schumer and Cantwell are reacting to the recession by introducing a "Shareholder Bill of Rights" that, among other provisions, "requires public companies to split the jobs of CEO and Chairman of the Board, and requires the Chairman to be an independent director." This set-up even draws praise from some in the private sector; the Australian hedge fund manager John Hempton, at his Bronte Capital blog, writes, "Corporate governance in America sucks. Only in America is it standard to combine the job of CEO and Chairman of the board – making the CEO answerable to nobody."

This report that the U.S. government will end up owning 70 percent of the post-bankruptcy General Motors raises some questions. How long will the government hold on to that stake? And if you are an owner of a competing car company — for example, a shareholder in Ford or Toyota or Honda — do you really want to be competing with an auto-maker whose owner, Uncle Sam, has the power to set rules for auto emissions and fuel economy and is also a major purchaser of cars for the federal fleet?

Or could government ownership wind up running GM into the ground, and end up being good for its competitors and bad for its taxpayer-owners? Federal Express and UPS, after all, have done pretty well competing with the United States Postal Service. It'll be interesting to see for how long Government Motors keeps cranking out cars like the gas guzzling Cadillac Escalade.

The Breaking Views column in today's New York Times is an example of how quickly the underlying assumptions have changed when it comes to who makes decisions in our economy. In an article on Wall Street pay, the column says, "A shift to fixed from variable pay undermines some of better aspects of Wall Street's model. It would be better for regulators to focus on finding ways to link bonuses to genuine performance, judged over several years, before salaries rise across the board to the detriment of shareholders — and, once again, taxpayers."

The usually moderate, sober New York Times columnist David Brooks has an iron fist inside his velvet glove today, issuing an article likening President Obama's treatment of the auto and health care industries to "the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II." Elsewhere in the same column, Mr. Brooks, who is Jewish, writes that Mr. Obama is acting "in the same spirit that the Cossacks invited my ancestors to emigrate to the Lower East Side."

In more raucous precincts of the right, the Obama-Nazi parallel has already been aired. The May issue of the American Spectator carries an article headlined "The National Socialism of Obamanomics." Before the election, Fouad Ajami, writing on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, likened the crowd dynamics around Obama not to Hitler but to Nasser or Khomeini.

If President Obama disagrees with the Republican National Committee members who use the word "socialism" to describe what the government is up to, who is there out there who agrees that the s-word fits? The answer is, of all people, President Clinton's left-leaning former secretary of labor, Robert Reich. In a blog posting this week, Mr. Reich uses the phrase "lemon socialism" to describe what is going on.

A group of members of the Republican National Committee has proposed a resolution "Recognizing the Democrats' March Toward Socialism." An excerpt from the full text, which is worth clicking through to and reading in full:

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.

When the New York Times, to its credit, asked President Obama whether he was a socialist, the president denied it, and suggested in effect that the real socialist was President George W. Bush. The Times story is here.

The Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, was up on Capitol Hill this morning testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. One of the terms he used in his prepared remarks was "systemic risk." Said the Treasury secretary: "In the fall of 2008, major policy intervention...reduced overt concerns about systemic risk." Later in his testimony, he says, "The rapid growth of the largest financial institutions and their increasing interconnections through securities markets have heightened systemic risk in the system. In response, we need to expand our capacity to contain systemic risk."

The wires have the story that today the government will announce it is moving up by four years, to 2016, the target date by which car companies must meet a corporate average fuel economy standard of 35 miles a gallon.

Even the most ardent libertarian would probably have to concede that cars and driving are an area where some government rules may make some sense. Driving without being able to see or without working brakes doesn't just put a driver's own life at risk, it can also endanger other drivers on the road. So the government gives vision tests for drivers' licenses and requires cars to periodically pass inspections.

The argument in favor of the fuel economy mandates is, basically, that driving a gas guzzler is as much of a danger to innocent bystanders as is a car with malfunctioning brakes or a visually impaired driver. Just the way a bystander might be killed by a car with bad brakes, he might be killed by a terrorist enriched by petrodollars, or he might be drowned by rising sea levels because of global warming caused by gas consumption.