The latest Rasmussen polling on the federal takeover of General Motors: 53 percent of those polled think it was a bad idea, while 26 percent think it was a good idea. Fifty-seven percent of Americans expect the government to pass laws and regulations giving the automakers it owns an unfair advantage over other auto companies. GM is in the unusual position of having shareholders -- American citizens -- who didn't want to buy the shares.

Having already replaced the chief executive at the largest domestic auto manufacturer, GM, the federal government, or at least an element of it, is now trying to replace the chief executive at one of America's largest banks, Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal reports. Regardless of what you think of the performance of Citi's management, there is something sobering about the government picking the leaders of what used to be our largest private companies. On the other hand, an alternative scenario in which the government pours tens of billions of dollars into companies without the ability to choose their management isn't particularly attractive, either.

With the Obama administration moving to take a greater role in auto manufacturing, banking, health care, and energy, one sector of the American economy that had seemed relatively safe from government intervention had been high-technology. This week's introduction of the Bing search engine by Microsoft was a reminder that there are areas where competition and innovation are thriving.

Dan Henninger has a scathing column in the Wall Street Journal today linking the policies of what he calls the "Obama government" to the fact that "Without exception, the Obama people with responsibility for the private economy come from a lifetime in politics, public administration or academia." Mr. Henninger is such a smooth writer that it sounds convincing — until one remembers that many of these policies and programs were begun in the Bush administration, where the Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, had plenty of private sector experience. These are bipartisan problems.

Mr. Obama himself made this point about the Bush-Paulson policies providing a precedent in response to the question from the New York Times about whether he was a socialist:

"It wasn't under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks," Mr. Obama said. "And it wasn't on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding."

Speaking of state-pension-fund capitalism, as we did in the review of Peter Peterson's new book, the Wall Street Journal has a story this morning describing in detail some of the dynamics of a Springfield, Missouri public pension fund's investment in a New York City office building.

For a memoir by an 83-year-old pillar of the establishment (chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations for 22 years, co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Blackstone Group, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Peter G. Peterson's new book, "The Education of an American Dreamer," (Twelve, 375 pages, $34.99) has the confessional, let-it-all-hang-out tone of a work by someone from another, younger, generation.

Money manager David Einhorn's warning about the Obama administration's idea "that creditor recoveries in troubled situations can be determined by an arbitrary sense of shared sacrifice rather than legal agreements and long- established prior practice" is the subject of a column by David Reilly of Bloomberg News.

The New York Times editorialists today back the idea of a federal tax on "drinks loaded with sugar." It is the ninth different tax increase that the Times has supported in the past six years, to judge by this New York Sun editorial on the first eight tax increases. The editorial doesn't explain what is particularly nefarious about drinks loaded with sugar as opposed to say, cupcakes, or cotton candy, or other sugary treats that are constituted as solids rather than liquids. What's next, a tax on newspapers with food sections carrying articles that encourage eating sugary treats?

Two bankruptcy law professors tell USA Today that the GM bankruptcy in essence avoids giving the full due process of law to the company's creditors. "It's a form of railroading. The creditors will get their token day in court before the sale is approved, but they won't get a meaningful day in court," says Lynn LoPucki, a University of California-Los Angeles, bankruptcy law professor. A bankruptcy law professor at the University of Michigan, John Pottow, tells the paper that those who argue that the government-GM tactic "bypasses both the spirit and intent of the bankruptcy code do have a good point."

NYU's Michael Levine, writing in the Financial Times, has an interesting take on how GM's bankruptcy differs from a normal bankruptcy filing:

the Obama administration overtly played favourites to get the United Auto Workers protection it would not have received under Section 1113, probably elevating costs in a way that will damage prospects for a successful reorganisation. It made and imposed business judgments on GM about what cars to make and what plants to close (and perhaps about suppliers and distribution) that no one in the government or on the task force had the experience to make and for which no one would be financially accountable. Worst of all, despite Sunday's desperate attempt to distance itself from GM's future decisions, it left its fingerprints all over the new plan. Inevitably the White House will take political and hence financial responsibility for its success, relieving pressure on management and labour to succeed.

"President Obama needs to put more effort and political capital into promoting the middle-class agenda that he outlined during the campaign," including "a fairer distribution of profits among shareholders, executives and employees," the New York Times editorializes this morning.

This is mystifying. I was paying fairly close attention during the campaign and don't recall Mr. Obama ever calling explicitly for "a fairer distribution of profits among shareholders, executives and employees." If he had done so, he might have been challenged to define what the fair distribution of such profits would be. Without knowing what "fair" is, it is hard to know what "fairer" is. Fifty percent, fifty percent, and fifty percent? There are some of us still so benighted as to think that profits are what belongs to the shareholders after the company the shareholders own is done paying the executives and the employees. Or that, at the very least, that it should be up to the owners of the company to decide how to divide the profits, not up to the president.

The Wall Street Journal's story this morning about how the Securities and Exchange Commission handled the case against Mark Cuban is a reminder that rather than being nonexistent, as President Clinton claims, the SEC has been quite active in quite a few high-profile cases. Just ask Martha Stewart.

Bloomberg has a news article about banks with some blunt quotes from money managers who think government ownership is a negative in a business. It quotes Philip Orlando of Federated Investors as saying, "You never want to have the government involved in your business...They're not businessmen; they're bureaucrats. They don't understand capitalism, they don't understand the profit motive and they don't understand the financial industry." Kevin Starke, an analyst at CRT Capital Group LLC in Stamford, Connecticut, is quoted as saying, "Every time I try to pitch an idea to investors that has some government involvement, the automatic reaction is, 'I don't want to get involved.'"

Paul Krugman has a column in today's New York Times blaming Reagan-era legislative changes for creating the current economic crisis:

Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down. These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

How's this for topsy-turvy: A columnist in Pravda, the old Communist Party organ, is warning that America's policies are looking "Red," and advising Russian investors to steer clear.

Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will...The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.

The article doesn't seem to have dissuaded the Russians who just paid $200 million for 1.96 percent of Facebook.