Is President Obama anti-business? The obvious answer is yes. Yet he insists he's a free-market guy who hates "meddling in the private sector" but has been forced to. So in deciding whether he's anti-business, let's be fair and judge Obama by nonideological and nonpartisan standards. I have four criteria: his appointments, his policies, his decisions, and his own words.

Democratic presidents are not famous for appointing businessmen, merchants, or entrepreneurs to their cabinet or senior White House staff. These are people who have started or run private businesses, created jobs, met payrolls, and made profits. Thus they might be sensitive to how government can help or hurt business enterprises, especially during an economic downturn.

The number of such people appointed by Obama: zero. Members of his cabinet and White House staff come predominantly from government, academia, think tanks, and the law. True, several were business consultants, Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki served on corporate boards, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel spent four years as an investment banker between government jobs.

But there's no one who ran a company, hired or fired workers, or was an entrepreneur. Obama doesn't qualify either. He worked as a lawyer, law school instructor, and community organizer. As a community organizer, he did many things, but starting a profit-making business and creating jobs weren't among them.

Now it's unfair to conclude solely on the basis of Obama's personnel decisions that he's anti-business. But his administration clearly isn't a hotbed of free marketers--quite the

Second, policies. When Obama announced last week the acceleration of his economic "stimulus," he was referring only to programs run or funded by the federal government. He offered nothing, not even a tiny tax incentive, to encourage investment in business and private job creation. This reflects Obama's policy initiatives across the board. They rely entirely on more government spending, regulation, and control. Obama would dramatically expand government's role in health care, energy, the environment, education, and much more. His "five pillars that will strengthen our economy" consist of spending programs, regulation of Wall Street, and imaginary deficit reduction. There's no role for business.

No doubt Obama would love to see the business community produce more jobs. But he and his congressional allies have done nothing to promote this and quite a bit to restrain it, despite the job-killing recession. This amazed Richard Posner. "Re-regulating banking, hauling bankers before congressional committees, passing laws tightening credit card lending, and capping bonuses all impede recovery," he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "All that is for later, once the economy is back on track."

Never accuse Obama of rejecting incentives. He favors them, just not for investors and business. In his town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last week, he said health insurance plans "should have incentives for people to use preventive services." And he praised "financial incentives" for healthful living. "If you lose weight, you will see an incentive, money in your pocket."