Conservatives brayed that government should stay out of the private sector; liberals bleated for nationalizing the banks.

China has lunged into the 21st century, while India is still lurching toward it.

The weak economy, widening income inequality, gridlock in Congress and a presidential election: Those were perhaps the dominant economic and political themes of 2012.

Finally, let's keep well in mind the most important lesson of the auto rescue: While government should stay away from the private sector as much as possible, markets do occasionally fail, and when they do government can play a constructive role, as it did in the case of the auto rescue.

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health-care resources more prudently – rationing, by its proper name – the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on “unearned income” have bounced up and down with regularity, and I’ve never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.

As a beneficiary of the carried interest loophole, I've seen firsthand the lack of any difference between the work involved in generating a carried interest and the work done by millions of other professionals who are taxed at the full 35 percent rate.