I had to do a double take of the by-line of an unabashedly pro-capitalism op-ed (subscription required) in today’s Wall Street Journal. Yes, indeed, that was Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who co-authored a piece with New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg on the need to rethink stifling regulation of America’s financial services industries, and to consider tort reform.

Lamenting the relative decline of NYC as the world’s financial capital, Schumer and Bloomberg identify stifling regulation and frivolous law suits in the United States as major factors contributing to London’s and Hong Kong’s relative ascent as premiere locations for initial public offerings in recent years. Among the facts they cite is that in 2005, only one out of the top 24 IPO’s was registered in the United States, while four were registered in London. Moreover, “next year more money will be raised through IPOs in Hong Kong than in either London or New York.”

Schumer and Bloomberg cite regulatory costs that are 15 times higher in the United States than in Britain, an adversarial relationship between “tough cop” regulators and business in the United States, and the surging costs of securities-related class action suits as key factors driving business away from New York’s financial houses. The auditing expenses associated with the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley are deemed to have grown “beyond anything Congress had anticipated.”

These are indeed serious problems, but it’s hard not to laugh about the irony. Schumer’s never met a regulation he didn’t like. He’s never been a friend of business. Of course he voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, along with all of his colleagues in the Senate, but he also led the charge against Kelloggs, General Mills, and the other cereal companies in the 1990s, when the price of Lucky Charms became unacceptably high to him. Just last summer, Schumer urged federal regulators to examine the behavior of oil companies to make sure they weren’t holding back production. And Schumer has been quick to ascend the podium to decry America’s growing trade deficit, urging, at times, government intervention to “correct” that growing problem.

That Schumer is suddenly opposed to stifling regulation and is saying things that are sure to upset the trial lawyers is welcome news. But it is likely just a fleeting flirtation with enlightenment. Let’s see what happens when someone points out to the Senator that New York’s capacity to attract IPOs, and the foreign investment that follows, is more a cause of the U.S. trade deficit than any “unfair trade” practices he assails. Which cause will he champion then?

As another election approaches, Americans have probably grown jaded toward politicians who use naked appeals to patriotism to win votes. Now patriotic appeals are being enlisted to sell pickup trucks.

Baseball fans watching the World Series game Friday night witnessed an ad by General Motors that had nothing to do with the finer qualities of its Silverado pick up truck. Set to the driving beat of a John Mellencamp song, “Our Country,” the ad flashed images designed to tug at the heart of every red-blooded American. (It certainly tugged at mine.) Here’s how a New York Times story today described the ad:

As the commercial begins, an industrial history rolls out, touching the usual icons of the Statue of Liberty, busy factory workers and Americans at their leisure. But then a more conflicted narrative emerges, quickly flashing on bus boycotts, Vietnam, Nixon resigning, Hurricane Katrina, fires, floods, then the attacks of Sept. 11, replete with firefighters.

All that’s missing is a plague of locusts, until the commercial intones ‘This is our country, this is our truck’ as a large Silverado emerges from amber waves of grain.

The not-so-subtle message is that if you are a real American, you buy a real American vehicle. Of course, this is not the first time patriotism has been exploited to sell a product, but the ad obscures an important fact about the American automobile industry: it is far more diverse today than the Big Three of Ford GM, and Chrysler.

In a Cato Free Trade Bulletin published over the summer, my colleague Dan Ikenson and I showed that, while Ford and GM in particular have struggled with declining sales and huge losses, the U.S. automobile market remains healthy. Last year, American workers produced about 12 million cars and light trucks domestically, including those made in factories owned by Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and BMW. American families can chose from a wider range of affordable, quality vehicles than perhaps ever before.

The Big Three have been losing market share, not because Americans are any less patriotic than in the past, but because Americans are increasingly exercising their freedom to decide for themselves what  is “our truck.”