Government goals different

Rob Leach (Nov. 28 letter) is seriously confused about the relationships between government, private enterprise and the larger society. Government exists to provide for the common defense and the common welfare in ways that private enterprise cannot or will not.

Data show, contrary to conservative myth, that wealth in America has been redistributed from the middle class to the top 2 percent for 30 years now, not the other way round. Data also show that the 2 percent are not job creators. They invest in their private accounts, not their companies. Why not tax them more?

Forty-seven percent of Americans are not freeloaders. They work and pay the payroll tax and regressive sales taxes. Social Security recipients are not takers either; their benefits are not gifts. They are a return of mandatory savings required of the beneficiaries for many years.

Perhaps Leach can explain to us how we can have less government when the population is above 300 million and the economic division of labor is impossibly complex. Explain as well how government can meet the expectations of the citizenry without fair taxation, and why the rich did not abandon the nation when their taxes were much higher than they are now.

Lee Freese

Pullman