Uncle Sam grabs the wheel.(Correction, Please!)(automobile industry bailout by the federal government)

ITEM: Reuters reported on December 30: "The Bush administration on Monday expanded its bailout of the U.S. auto industry, saying it was buying $5 billion in equity in auto and mortgage finance company GMAC and increasing a loan to General Motors by $1 billion. The action was the latest in a lengthy series of emergency government moves aimed at easing the worst credit crisis since the 1930s and limiting the severity of a year-long recession."

Earlier in December, continued the wire service, the government agreed "to rescue GM and Chrysler LLC with up to $17.4 billion in loans to stave off a collapse that would have cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and dealt a severe blow to an economy already in recession.... President George W. Bush said at the time that it would be irresponsible to let the automakers die. The White House moved on its own after Republicans in the Democratic-controlled Congress blocked a deal to provide emergency funds."

ITEM: In an interview with Business Week for December 10, Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was asked about the proposal to name a federal "car czar" for the auto industry, an idea supported by Frank. "How," asked the interviewer, "do you make sure the government doesn't meddle too deeply in day-to-day operations and bring politics--like a push for green cars--into the equation?" To which Frank responded: "Oh, well, a push for green cars is very much a part of what we're involved in. We don't think that's politics."

CORRECTION: Statists have long wanted to be able to force Americans to buy small, light, and ecologically green cars, whether they wished to or not. Now that GM is being transformed into "Government Motors," it is more in their power to do so. This is certainly "politics." After all, it is being done with our money. There will be more to come as the government keeps setting precedents for bailouts.

Elsewhere in the Business Week interview, when asked if GM should acquire Chrysler, Frank feigns modesty and says, "I'm not competent to say." Yet, he and many of his big-government cronies feel skilled enough to substitute for the decisions of millions by telling carmakers what to build and consumers what to buy.

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The Massachusetts congressman, who was neck-deep in promoting the policies and regulations that spawned the housing and credit bubble that led to much of our current economic crisis, also has tried to shift the blame for those problems on "right-wing Republicans who took the position that regulation was always bad, the market was self-correcting, and you should not have any restrictions on the free flow of capital." (It is bizarre to claim that the blundering of the officially "government-sponsored enterprises" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, underwritten by their congressional supporters with tax dollars, was a failure of the free market. For details see, for example, "Correction, Please!" for October 13, 2008.)