After reading [Morton Marcus’ Jan. 4 column] on the economics of government, I would like to nominate you for the Nobel Prize for Economics and Government 101. I particularly appreciate your “response” to the (implied) challenge that providing funding to the government (for services like libraries, roads, education, waste disposal, health care, etc.) is “socialism.”

Thank you also for briefly describing one of the obligations of our form of self-governance, that of citizenship and a commitment to the common good of all. We are a country governed by a Constitution and laws. Without three balanced and fully functioning (and therefore funded) branches of government, both our social and our economic systems would collapse—like those of many nation-states that have either: (a) failed (like Pakistan, Afghanistan and, unfortunately, many others); or (b) never really emerged (like many post-Soviet republics). It is through government and good governance that we, as citizens, establish the rules of law and fairness that bind us together as human beings, living in community together, not just as mini-versions of profit-maximizing corporations competing in a zero-sum game of monopoly.  

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Ron Mead