"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 52% of adults oppose more government regulation of the financial sector," the pollster reports. Twenty-eight percent said they favored more regulation, while 20% were not sure. Auditing the Federal Reserve gets the support of 79% of those polled.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial this morning about President Obama and the banks that makes some excellent points about how banks are caught in between demands to lend more and demands to lend less. A couple of other aspects of the editorial are worth comment. Says the Journal, "if Mr. Obama wants the banks to lend more, he should tell the Fed to start to rein in its excessively easy credit now that the financial crisis is over and the economic recovery gains steam." Interesting that the Journal thinks we're in an economic recovery. Does that mean the stimulus worked?

The editorial suggests the Fed has mismanaged monetary policy, but it doesn't make the leap from that view to questioning whether we should have a Fed at all. Perhaps that is because it was written before last night's dinner between Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot and "End the Fed" author Rep. Ron Paul.

All this week I'm serving as the token free-market advocate at that bastion of big-government regulation known as the Manhattan Institute. Seriously, all snideness or humor aside, I'm quite grateful for the opportunity to be participating in an online discussion on the Manhattan Institute Web site with Nicole Gelinas, who is the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of its City Journal. The discussion is about Ms. Gelinas's new book, After The Fall: Saving Capitalism From Wall Street -- and Washington, which, if you want to know what I think about, well, click on over to the online discussion. We're trying to keep it civil, but the sparks are flying. And if you still aren't sold on clicking through, let me just say that the post I sent over there last night includes references to both Playboy magazine and the Securities Act of 1933.

It's not just President Obama who seems to want to think these days that the financial crisis is all the fault of Wall Street, and that government had nothing to do with it. Here's Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's column in this morning's New York Times: "Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown." But even Mr. Krugman has blamed the politicians for unfettering the bankers. And in the past, as recently as three months ago, President Obama himself said that the blame belongs to Washington as well as Wall Street and Main Street: "What took place one year ago was not merely a failure of regulation or legislation; it was not merely a failure of oversight or foresight. It was a failure of responsibility that allowed Washington to become a place where problems – including structural problems in our financial system – were ignored rather than solved. It was a failure of responsibility that led homebuyers and derivative traders alike to take reckless risks they couldn't afford. It was a collective failure of responsibility in Washington, on Wall Street, and across America that led to the near-collapse of our financial system one year ago." In other words, it's not some conservative bizarro universe that says Washington bears some of the blame for the crisis; it's the conventional wisdom as reflected by President Obama. If anyone's operating in a bizarro universe here, it's Mr. Krugman. Like nearly everyone who throws the word "greedy" around pejoratively these days, Mr. Krugman doesn't define it or say how it differs from the profit motive or rational self-interest that is part of capitalism.

President Obama tells "60 Minutes" he's "not happy" that Wall Street firms are going to be paying out tens of billions of dollars in bonuses. "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of you know, fat cat bankers on Wall Street. Nothing has been more frustrating to me this year than having to salvage a financial system at great expense to taxpayers that was precipitated, that was caused in part by completely irresponsible actions on Wall Street." He goes on, "the people on Wall Street still don't get it. They don't get it. They're still puzzled, why is it that people are mad at the banks. Well, let's see. You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it's gone through in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we've got ten percent unemployment. Why do you think people might be a little frustrated." As if "fat cats" isn't colorful enough, he goes on to compare the bankers to suicide bombers: "The problem is that unfortunately this is like the guy who has dynamite strapped around him and his finger on the button. You know, you gotta kind of talk him down because all of us could go. If the banking system had collapsed completely, then we really would've been in a great depression. Unemployment might have been double what it is right now. It would've been so massively destructive that any satisfaction we would've gotten from seeing these guys lose their shirts would've been offset by a extraordinary amount of hardship around the country."

About 90% of China's billionaires are the children of high-ranking government officials, says the Wall Street Journal, by way of explaining a survey finding that 96% of the Chinese public said they feel resentful toward the rich. Pretty good explanation, I'd say, even discounting for the possibility that some of these "princelings" may be billionaires not because they used their government connections to help their business, but because of good genes, good parenting, or good schooling. It's yet another data point, in addition to how China treats its human rights lawyers, to make one question GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt's characterization of the Chinese government as, like Ronald Reagan, "good," "great leaders" who are worthy of emulation. And another data point in my argument that Goldman Sachs went astray in getting too close to China. Warren Buffett has done some of this, too, with investments in Chinese battery-maker BYD and Darfur-linked Petrochina (which he exited at a $3.5 billion profit). Mr. Buffett takes free suits from a publicly traded Chinese apparel maker, and even Mr. Buffett's purchase of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad has been interpreted as a bet on China because of the railroad's strong routes from Pacific ports such as Long Beach and Seattle. Somehow Mr. Buffett manages to maintain his down-home all-American image.

A letter from the radio and Fox News television personality Sean Hannity dated November 16, 2009 just arrived at my home, asking me to join the Heritage Foundation. A significant portion of the letter is devoted to immigration. "It's not too much to say that Heritage's research -- the facts they uncovered, the numbers they calculated -- prevented several really dangerous pieces of immigration legislation from becoming law," the letter says. Mr. Hannity's letter offers three examples of discoveries by Heritage policy experts: "They discovered that: one proposal would have added more than 100 million new legal immigrants to our population over the next 20 years." Got that? Heritage and Hannity here aren't arguing against illegal immigration but against "legal immigrants" -- people like the founder of Google, Sergey Brin, an immigrant from Russia, or Mr. Hannity's own boss at Fox, Rupert Murdoch, who is an immigrant from Australia. Or like Mr. Hannity's own grandparents, who reportedly immigrated to America from Ireland.

FutureOfCapitalism.com is no great defender of the Senate's expansion of the government role in health care, but some of the bill's critics seem willing to throw even flawed arguments at the plan. Here's the Wall Street Journal editorial this morning: "Medicare reimburses doctors and hospitals at rates 70% to 80% below those of private insurers, which means below the actual treatment costs in many cities and regions. Providers either eat these losses—about half of U.S. hospitals are running a deficit or close to it—or they raise prices for private payers. This cost-shifting isn't dollar for dollar, but all empirical research shows that it adds tens of billions of dollars to consumer health bills."

There are plenty of explanations for the closure of Editor & Publisher, but one factor has to be that the Poynter Institute, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Journalism Review have all competed with it with the assistance of tax-exempt status from the government.

Another argument against a transaction tax is that, in order to not simply push trading elsewhere, it would have to be global. Even Speaker Pelosi understands this; by one account, she said, "It would have to be an international rule, not just a U.S. rule...We couldn't do it alone, we'd have to do it as an international initiative." By another account, she said, "what we are talking about is a global transaction [tax]...something that we would do in conjunction with other G nations, whether it is G8, G20, whatever the current G number is." When companies get together to fix prices, it's called an anti-competitive, anti-consumer anti-trust violation. But when countries get together to fix tax rates, it's called international cooperation. As we've pointed out before in other contexts, the G20 includes such undemocratic countries as Saudi Arabia and China (remember how China treats its human rights lawyers?), so allowing these countries to play a role in imposing American tax rates veers uncomfortably close to taxation without representation. This is an issue bigger than merely the transaction tax; the prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, and the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, have an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal in which they agree that a "one-off tax in relation to bonuses should be considered a priority" and add that "the action that must be taken must be at a global level. No one territory can be expected to or be able to act on its own." One of the things the American Revolution was about was preventing British politicians from setting American tax policy. First it was tea, now it is banker bonuses. The Sarkozy-Brown article also mentions the need to "address climate change," and one of the less attractive aspects of the Copenhagen conference is seeing China, the world's largest polluter (did we mention how it treats its human rights lawyers?) lecture America on how the U.S. has a "legal and historical responsibility" to pay billions of dollars to poorer countries to fight global warming. All in all the picture is of the power to tax slipping away from America's elected representatives and into the hands of foreign politicians, which is cause for concern, even for someone like me who as a general matter is far more internationalist that isolationist in disposition and who supports the ability of sovereign states to negotiate tax treaties in their national interests.

The musician Bono travels the world urging governments and other to aid Africa and forgive debt. One reason he can afford to do that may be that he structures his own affairs so as to minimize his tax liabilities. Slate's Timothy Noah wrote about this back in 2006. It's back in the news now because, as the Tax Foundation blog reports, the finance minister of Ireland has proposed a "Bono Tax" to rectify the fact that "many of the top earners in Ireland pay less than 5% of their income in tax due to exemptions and deductions."

Situations -- Saab, Gourmet -- where a company might rather close a money-losing subsdiary than sell it to a firm that might successfully turn it around have been a topic of interest here. The latest example is Nielsen Business Media's decision to close Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus gave a nasty, ideologically biased review to my Samuel Adams book, so the news draws more interest from me than it might otherwise. You'd think that some buyer -- either a bottom-fishing vulture investor or someone ideologically minded who'd like a chance to shape the debate with a first word on books that gets read by bookstore buyers and library purchasers and is reprinted on some of the ecommerce book sites -- would make a lowball offer and have some fun with it. Maybe such an offer has already been made but wasn't high enough to entice Nielsen to risk the embarassment of having a buyer make a success of a publication that was failing under its ownership. On the other hand, this may be another example of the trend away from centralized taste-making a la the Kirkus review and toward more democratic, user-generated content, like the user-generated reviews on Amazon.com. The same week Kirkus announced it was closing, GoodReads, which says it has 2.8 million registered users, announced a round of venture capital financing, that, as reported by Publisher's Lunch, is "close to $2 million." GoodReads is founded by Otis Chandler, whose family used to own and run the Los Angeles Times, which stopped publishing its Sunday book review as a separate section back in 1997. How's that for creative destruction and the self-correction of a market, as opposed to the government subsidy that the New York Times quoted historian David Brinkley suggesting in the N.Y. Times article on the demise of the Washington Post's Book World?

We've been writing here for some time about General Electric's new emphasis on the government. Now the company's chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt, has made the approach explicit in a really remarkable speech delivered yesterday at West Point. The Financial Times has a news article; here is the text in pdf. Here's one key section, echoing the Obama administration's "change" theme: "we should welcome the government as a catalyst for leadership and change. I believe in the endless possibilities of individual choice and private initiative. But this isn't the first time that business and government have had to work together for national ends. We should work together again today, setting goals for productivity, job creation and exports. There's a long history in this country of government spending that prepares the way for new industries that thrive for generations. Think of the Department of Defense, and all the commercial innovations that came out of military investments – from computing to transportation to healthcare. Through a real public-private partnership, we can dramatically improve America's competitiveness. Today, people in this country want to see business and government work together." The talk of business-government "partnership" is reminscent of the comment by PepsiCo chief executive Indra Nooyi that got Nassim Nicholas Talib and Niall Ferguson all riled up at that New York Public Library-Aspen Institute event last month.

The Wall Street Journal reports on a letter from David Gelbaum that says he donated $47.7 million to the Sierra Club Foundation from 2005 to 2009, and $94 million to the ACLU over the same period. Yet another data point -- along with George Soros's $50 million project to reinvent economics -- that puts news that the Manhattan Institute has upped the financial ante on the Hayek Lecture to $50,000 in a different context. The Journal article reports that Mr. Gelbaum is cutting back on his giving because his investments in alternative energy are illiquid. This just underscores the point we've been making here about how government policies favoring alternative energy can be reverse-Robin Hoods. The Sierra Club backs alternative energy policies that, if implemented, will further enrich Mr. Gelbaum, who is already rich enough to lavish $47.7 million on the Sierra Club Foundation. All this is done under the charitable and tax exempt halo of "philanthropy."

This video of a Republican congressman from Michigan, Mike Rogers, speaking at a Congressional hearing about health care back in July has been viewed an impressive 6.7 million times on YouTube. He begins worrying that the health care of the 85% of Americans who have insurance is going to be ruined as part of the effort to expand coverage to the uninsured. "Why would we punish the part that's working to cover the part that's not?" he asks. My immediate thought was whether to wonder whether, given the soaring costs -- "relentlessly rising premiums," as the New York Times says -- it's accurate to describe the American health care system as working. Mr. Rogers has a pretty good response to that in the form of studies from Britain and Canada finding that "If you have prostate cancer, you have a less chance of survivability than you do in the United States. And that's the same for skin cancer, breast cancer, bladder cancer, cervical cancer, kidney cancer, ovarian cancer, leukemia, and the list goes on and on and on." The congressman goes on: "You're gonna look your mothers and daughters in the eye...If you get breast cancer, I'm sorry, honey, you have less of a chance of survival than you did before this bill passed." Mr. Rogers also taps in to the concern that health care is part of a broader expansion of government's role: "We're gonna tell you what kind of car to drive, we're gonna tell you what kind of light bulb you can put in, what kind of window you have to replace your house with, and oh, by the way, now we're gonna pick your doctor and your plan."