• Dependence on Government Grows. This is not good news. “The recession is driving the safety net of government benefits to a historic high, as one of every six dollars of Americans’ income is now coming in the form of a federal or state check or voucher.”
• Are Progressives Losing Steam? Dana Milbank notes that “it’s more fun to be an opposition bomb-thrower than a palace guard.”
• The Rise of New Conservative Media Outlets.

• 25 Ways Not to Get Rich.
• Is This Really a Separate Field of Study? “Harvard University will endow a visiting professorship in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, a position that, it believes, will be the first endowed, named chair in the subject at an American college.”
• The Man in Charge of GM. He is “a not-quite graduate of Yale Law School who had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry. Nor, for that matter, had he given much thought to what ailed an industry that had been in decline ever since he was born.…Mr. Deese’s role is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.”

• The Astounding World of the Future!
• Nostalgianomics. Was the mid-20^th century really all that Paul Krugman says it was?
• Next Up, Alistair Darling. This doesn’t look good for Labour.
• Professor George on George Tiller’s Murder. “By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion.”

Color me skeptical:

After a planned GM bankruptcy, during which the company will seek to shed burdensome debts, the U.S. and Canadian governments will own 72.5 percent of the reorganized automaker. In addition, GM will owe the United States about $8 billion.

The United States could recover most of that investment by 2013, when, sources said, a Treasury projection shows the company would reach an equity value of $75 billion.

The government share, by then slightly diluted, would be worth about $46 billion. The $8 billion debt would have been repaid, and the government would have reaped billions in preferred-stock payments. Sources said the estimates are constantly being refined.

So government bureaucrats, who are spending other people’s money, are sanguine about the government “investment” in General Motors. By contrast, investors who are spending their own money are fleeing for the hills: the GM stock price has been in free-fall, closing the week at 75 cents a share. If the company’s recovery under nationalization were such a sure thing, wouldn’t the stock price be increasing, not decreasing?

• The Financial Crisis, Free Markets, and the Nirvana Fallacy. David Bernstein on whether it really was the absence of regulation that precipitated the financial crisis.
• Tax ‘Loopholes.’ The idea that Delaware holding companies offer a “tax loophole” depriving states of tax revenues is premised on the dubious notion that a government has some “rightful” claim to part of a private firm’s earnings.
• David Brooks on the New Public-Private Partnerships. “These events have heralded a new era of partnership between the White House and private companies, one that calls to mind the wonderful partnership Germany formed with France and the Low Countries at the start of World War II.”
• NRSC Angering Online Base Work with your online supporters, don’t alienate them.