The news that Israel was to raise its tax on energy extraction, to 52-62%, from the current 33%, following the discovery of large natural gas reserves was flagged here back in August. Now the New York Times reports that the Israeli cabinet "voted overwhelmingly" yesterday to nearly double the tax. The Israeli business newspaper Globes quotes one member of the Israeli parliament as explaining that one gas field is not included because of "reservations in principle about changing the rules set by the government itself, after money was invested in the project." One might have thought that maybe such reservations or principles might have stopped the whole tax increase, but alas it seems like that is too much even for the free-market-oriented by Israeli standards Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The CEO of Goldline International Inc., Scott Carter, was in New York this week and made time for an interview with FutureOfCapitalism.com over lunch in Midtown Manhattan.

Goldline made headlines here last year when a Democratic congressman, Anthony Weiner, called the company in for a hearing and sponsored legislation seeking to crack down on gold and silver coin dealers. At the time, Mr. Carter said he thought the company was being singled out because of its sponsorship of conservative talk radio and television shows.

The first news out of the lunch is that the congressional onslaught hasn't exactly hurt Goldline's sales. The company's revenues, he says, were $854 million in 2010, up from about $650 million in 2009 and about $350 million in 2008. Some of that has been driven by the increase in the price of gold, but even so, it's a growth trend line that a lot of businesses would envy.

N. Richard Greenfield files the following dispatch from Massachusetts:

It was just last year when Scott Brown was in the van of events that saw Republican victories in two big-state governor's races and the historic march to majorities in the House of Representatives in Washington. Brown won the "Kennedy Seat" in the U.S. Senate and did it with style, substance and more than a bit of good fortune. Offering himself up as the stop-gap vote in the Senate against President Obama's health care bill, he tapped into a deep vein of resentment that produced votes from all three segments of the Commonwealth's polity: Democrat, Republican and Independent. He added his personal flair to this effort, crisscrossing the state in his well-worn pick up truck, his everyman symbol. Brown ran a great race, aided by an opponent who didn't. In fact she didn't even see him coming until very late in the game. Under pressure, Middlesex County (north & west of Boston) District Attorney Martha Coakley went from gaffe to gaffe, including claiming Red Sox pitching great Curt Schilling was a Yankee fan, which is a remark tough to walk-back in Boston.

One more point on President Obama's decision to name General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as chairman of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness: As CEO of GE, Mr. Immelt's performance, at least as measured by the stock price, has been a disappointment. When he took over on September 7, 2001, GE was at about $29 a share (this number is from Yahoo Finance, which says it is adjusted for dividends and splits). Yesterday it closed at $18.43. Today it's up to about $19.44, but even so, about a third of the company's value, or about $100 billion of shareholder property, has been destroyed on Mr. Immelt's watch, by the stock market's measure. The stock has underperformed the S&P 500 index over the period.

Am I the only one a little bit uncomfortable with Jeffrey Immelt chairing President Obama's "President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness" while also continuing to serve as chairman and chief executive of General Electric?

In the Washington Post op-ed announcing his own appointment, Mr. Immelt writes, "The assumption made by many that the United States could transition from a technology-based, export-oriented economic powerhouse to a services-led, consumption-based economy without any serious loss of jobs, prosperity or prestige was fundamentally wrong." That's a straw man, but his point is to call for a government jobs strategy aimed at "making the United States the world's leading exporter in the 21st century." Oh, and it just so happens that GE is "one of America's largest exporters."

Charles Krauthammer has a column on ObamaCare, the deficit, and what to do about it: "amending an insanely complicated, contradictory, incoherent and arbitrary 2,000-page bill that will generate tens of thousands of pages of regulations is a complete non-starter. Everything begins with repeal."

President Obama should issue an executive order requiring all companies with federal contracts to pay suppliers within 30 days rather than the "net 60" or "net 120" that is increasingly common, Jonathan Alter writes in a Bloomberg News column.

Mr. Alter portrays this as a way to look out for "small, vulnerable firms" and "small business." But if that is the idea, the two examples he gives aren't particularly apt:

consider the case of Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, the Belgian company that is the world's largest brewer. Net 60 is too wimpy for these folks. They routinely stiff their advertising agencies and other vendors for four months: Net 120.

Ah, Budweiser's small, vulnerable advertising agency. That would be DDB, "with more than 200 offices in 90 countries," which itself is part of Omnicom, a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of $13.7 billion.

More from Mr. Alter:

A direct mail solicitation landed in my mailbox today from One Medical Group, "introducing a whole new way for you to see the doctor."

What's the new way? "To support our practice, we ask patients to pay a low annual membership fee of $199." For this you can "schedule your appointments online," "see your doctor on time," and "email your doctor with questions."

My reactions:

1. This is great — free market competition and technology, rather than government mandates, addressing health care access and quality issues.

Trying to placate public pension funds annoyed by Byron Wein's statement that public employee benefits are too generous, the money management firm Blackstone has now issued a statement declaring, "We oppose scapegoating public employees by blaming them for the structural budget deficits that cities and states face." No one's scapegoating anyone, but it's hard to see this as anything other than a sorry display of spinelessness by Blackstone, whose business depends on winning investments from public employee pension funds on which public employee unions are well represented. Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson made a public career out of warning that Social Security and the federal budget is at risk, while getting rich in part by accumulating fees from a state and local pension system that put state and local budgets at risk. When it comes to disregard for the taxpayers, sometimes the government contractors are as bad as the politicians, or worse. At least the politicians have to stand for re-election.

Venture capitalist Esther Dyson has a terrific column about how private space companies are outpacing NASA:

Governments are great at funding and carrying out research, but competitive private companies motivated by profit and glory tend to be more efficient and speedier in applying the results....government research agencies are not the right type of organization to run routine operations that could be better handled by businesses....Whereas governments and government contractors generally enjoy job security, private companies know that the money may run out. Also, private companies compete.

The Associated Press marks the 50th anniversary of JFK's inaugural address with an "analysis" about how much things have changed since then, declaring, "Were it uttered by a modern politician, Kennedy's famous 'ask not' call to service might well be derided as a socialist pitch for more government."

Truth is, it was derided at the time as such; as Mark Perry recently noted, Milton Friedman's 1962 Capitalism and Freedom complained that "'what you can do for your country' implies the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary." At least Friedman, though, agreed with the "ask not what your country can do for you" part, praising the message of individual responsibility, which the Associated Press, alas, seems to have edited out of the Kennedy legacy.

Mark Steyn has a piece in the New Criterion laying out the case for American (and British) decline:

According to the cbo's 2010 long-term budget outlook, by 2020 the U.S. government will be paying between 15 and 20 percent of its revenues in debt interest—whereas defense spending will be down to between 14 and 16 percent. America will be spending more on debt interest than China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey, and Israel spend on their militaries combined. The superpower will have advanced from a nation of aircraft carriers to a nation of debt carriers.....

A column in today's New York Times appears under the headline "Goldman Sachs's Navel-Gazing Comes Up Short." The column, provided by the non-profit news organization ProPublica, criticizes Goldman Sachs and advises the firm to break itself up into smaller pieces:

Despite Goldman's reputation in some corners as Evil Genius, its shares are actually suffering in the marketplace because investors worry about its volatile and unpredictable results from quarter to quarter. These concerns were validated when Goldman reported on Wednesday that trading and securities services profit took a big hit in the fourth quarter, dropping 31 percent. The stock slid 3 percent by midafternoon in response.

The New York Times has a story about how permit requirements add to the cost of solar energy:

Ken Button, the president of Verengo Solar Plus, a residential solar panel installer in Orange, Calif., says his company — and his industry — are being strangled by municipal red tape.

Fifteen Verengo employees, Mr. Button said, are dedicated solely to researching and tailoring permit applications to meet the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies of the dozens of towns in the company's market. And because most jurisdictions require applications to be submitted in person, Verengo employs two "permit runners" whose only job, Mr. Button said, is to "take those permit packs and physically drive them around, stand in line, and pay the fees."....

In a new study, the industry estimates that the permit dance adds an average of $2,500 in costs to each installation

New York Times columnist Gail Collins has a column critical of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who announced he won't seek re-election: "Lieberman has reached a point in his public career when every single thing he does, including talking about his grandparents, is irritating."

One might say the same thing about Gail Collins. If one is seeking an explanation why Ms. Collins finds Mr. Lieberman so irritating, it probably can be found in the sentence of the column in which she refers to the Bible as the "Old Testament."