More private sector job-creation: Goldman Sachs has hired Theo Lubke, who spent the past 15 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was "most recently the head of the Financial Infrastructure Department in the Bank Supervision Group," the Wall Street Journal reports. At Goldman he will be "chief regulatory reform officer."

New York Times op-ed page editor David Shipley and former Clinton administration foreign policy official James Rubin are going to Bloomberg News to "lead a new Editorial Page called the Bloomberg View which will publish columns and commentary," the wire announced.

"There is an urgent need for ideology-free, empirically-based editorial positions about the pressing issues of our time, and we plan to deliver them," Mr. Rubin said in the press release.

I'd settle for some ideology-free news coverage and polls, never mind opinion, but I wish them the best of luck. It says something about dynamism and capitalism that someone would leave the op-ed editorship of the New York Times to go start something at Bloomberg.

Thomas Friedman attempts to make up for some of his earlier admiring writing about China with a strong paragraph in his New York Times column:

Mr. Liu was represented at Friday's Nobel ceremony by an empty chair because China would not release him from prison — only the fifth time in the 109-year history of the prize that the winner was not in attendance. Under pressure from Beijing, the following countries joined China's boycott of the ceremony: Serbia, Morocco, Pakistan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Colombia, Ukraine, Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam and the Philippines. What a pathetic bunch.

Iraq! Afghanistan! Egypt! Saudi Arabia! These are countries in which America has invested an awful lot of tax dollars and lives in building up. Pretty remarkable.

The New York Times has a nifty little piece explaining the tax consequences of baseball pitcher Cliff Lee's decision to join the Phillies.

Amid all the talk about the tax deal, including the complaining about it on the left, one point I haven't heard made, but that has some merit, is that if President Obama and the Congressional complainers really felt strongly about raising taxes on the rich and extending the tax cuts for everyone else, they had nearly two years to do that, and they didn't.

It's not like it was some kind of surprise that the tax cuts were going to expire at the end of this year. Everyone knew it. Mr. Obama even campaigned on the issue in 2008. He was elected with a lot of political capital and with Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. But instead of tackling the tax issue, he chose to do other things — "stimulus," health care, financial reform. President Obama and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate left the tax issue unsolved until just weeks before the tax cuts were due to expire, creating uncertainty for business, investors, and individual taxpayers.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tries out a column for Bloomberg News, denouncing the deal to keep tax rates unchanged as "appalling giveaways to the wealthy." He also warns:

The American Opportunity Tax Credit, for instance, is an Obama program worth as much as $2,500 a year for tuition. The compromise extends the program from the Recovery Act. If the compromise fails, millions of students won't be able to go to college.

The New York Times carries a column by David Leonhardt likening opposition to ObamaCare to opposition to civil rights. The column says:

Guaranteeing people a decent retirement and decent health care does more than smooth out the rough edges of capitalism. Those guarantees give people the freedom to take risks. If you know that professional failure won't leave you penniless and won't prevent your child from receiving needed medical care, you can leave the comfort of a large corporation and take a chance on your own idea. You can take a shot at becoming the next great American entrepreneur.

If President Obama is hoping that an economic recovery will be powered by consumer spending, the message hasn't made its way over to the Pentagon, which is advising military families this holiday season to "Look for ways to cut back on the number of gifts you buy," send "e-cards instead of regular cards," and ask, "could you drive instead of fly? Stay with a friend or relative instead of in a hotel room? Make do without a rental car?"

If the retail, card, hotel, or airline industries have a strong holiday season, it's not going to be thanks to the military, at least if they follow the advice given in this article from the official Armed Forces Press Service, based on a Defense Department Web site for military families.

Amity Shlaes has a Bloomberg News column critical of the tax deal because of the cut in the Social Security payroll tax. She writes, "Pensions are contracts, even public pensions like Social Security....When a showcase contract like Social Security is compromised, citizens' faith in other contracts, public or private, begins to fray. Their willingness to invest or hire weakens....In its Social Security component the new tax deal honors the precedent set when the federal government sacrificed bondholders and creditors to unions in the recent auto bailouts. It seems any deal or promise is subordinate to servicing the general economy and its managers."

The Wall Street Journal this morning publishes an op-ed by Burton Malkiel arguing that U.S. investors should have 10% of their portfolios allocated to China. The Journal identifies him as follows: "Mr. Malkiel is a professor of economics at Princeton University. This op-ed was adapted from the upcoming 10th edition of his book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," out this month by W.W. Norton."

What the Journal does not disclose to readers is that Mr. Malkiel is the chief investment officer of Alphashares, LLC, "an investment management firm dedicated to providing investors with strategies and products that allow them to participate in China's economic boom."

The Journal op-ed concludes, "Well diversified, relatively low-expense index funds that trade as ETFs should prove to be useful vehicles for individual investors to benefit from China's continued growth."

Former George W. Bush administration official Keith Hennessey has a pretty good post pushing back against the conservative critics of the tax deal (who now also include Mitt Romney). The Romney piece suggests "perhaps establishing individual unemployment savings accounts over which employees would exercise direct control when they lose their jobs."

There is going to be a lot of praise lavished on Richard Holbrooke in the coming hours and days for his service as an American diplomat, much of it deserved. But Holbrooke, who died today, was also a businessman, a fact that shouldn't be forgotten. Anyone admiring Holbrooke is, whether they intend to or not, making the point that you don't have to be a professor or community organizer to make a positive contribution to this country — you can work in financial services, too. You can even be "rich" — Mr. Holbrooke had houses in Bridgehampton and Telluride and owned a 1/16th interest in a Cessna 680 jet. This 2001 press release from Perseus LLC announcing that Holbrooke was joining as vice chairman conveyed the idea:

It's the politicians, not the billionaires, who are the greedy ones, writes William McGurn in a Wall Street Journal piece on the moral case against tax increases.

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new post up at Forbes about the court ruling finding ObamaCare unconstitutional:

If the system is going to give some individuals a subsidy, it must find a way to tax someone else to provide that subsidy. Hence the individual mandate.

Notwithstanding the unanimous support of the cross subsidy by the political classes, their use is not a sound idea. Cross subsidies are always unstable because they lead to overconsumption by the privileged class and massive resistance by the losers. In a real sense, a revitalized takings clause argument would condemn these as transfers of wealth from A to B, without just cause.

But here no one in the political elites of either party wants to challenge the correctness of the subsidy.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an eminent-domain-related appeal from Nick Sprayregen, the West Harlem property owner who stood in the way of an expansion by Columbia University.

A federal judge in Richmond, Virginia, Henry Hudson, ruled ObamaCare's individual mandate and associated penalty for not buying health insurance to be unconstitutional.

Opposition to the tax deal is building on the right. Rush Limbaugh is against it. Powerline's John Hinderaker is skeptical. TeaPartyPatriots.org is against it. Hugh Hewitt is against it.