- Mark Dolliver

As industry organizations join in a court battle to roll back recently enacted controls on tobacco marketing, a newly released Harris Poll indicates a downward trend in public enthusiasm for greater regulation of most industries -- tobacco included.

Fielded last month, the survey asked adults whether they think a number of industries should be "more regulated by government" than they are now. "Tobacco companies" were at the upper end of the scale, with 33 percent of respondents saying they should be more regulated. But while up 2 percentage points from last year, the "more regulated" vote is down 11 points from where it stood in 2003, at the beginning of this series of polls.

Indeed, support for more regulation of all the industries about which people were asked has drifted downward during this decade, with the sole exception of the banking sector (for all-too-obvious reasons). For example, while 47 percent of respondents think "oil companies" should be more regulated by the government than they are now, that's down 5 percentage points since 2003. The figure has dropped by 10 percentage points (to 47 percent) for "pharmaceutical and drug companies," despite the opprobrium heaped on that sector during the ongoing debate about healthcare reform. The same goes for "health insurance companies" (down 14 percentage points, to 45 percent) and "managed care companies such as HMOs (down 24 points, to 36 percent).

There have even been declines with respect to sectors whose "more regulated" votes were low to begin with. One example: Support for more regulation of "computer software companies" has fallen by 5 percentage points since 2003, to its current 6 percent. The figure for "supermarkets" has also dropped by 5 points, to its current 5 percent.

With memories still fresh of last year's meltdown in the banking sector -- and, for that matter, news still coming every week or so of another bank failure -- it's not surprising that respondents want to see that industry more tightly regulated. Forty percent said they want to see more regulation of banks, vs. 21 percent saying so in 2003.

At its current 21 percent, the figure for "car manufacturers" is 3 percentage points lower than it was in 2003. But the tally jumped 5 points in the past year, as much of the domestic auto industry became a ward of the state.

Elsewhere in the poll, support for more regulation of "airlines" is at 23 percent, down 8 points from its 2003 level. And the figure for "packaged food companies" is down 6 points since then, to 20 percent, despite tainted-food episodes that have occurred in the intervening years.