The following is a letter to the editor that I submitted to The New York Times on February 5, 2002. To the Editor: Your February 5 editorial stated: "The Bush budget is a road map toward a different kind of American society, in which the government no longer taxes the rich to aid the poor, and in fact does very little but protect the nation from foreign enemies." I only wish this were true. What a moral and utopian laissez faire capitalistic society we would live in if the government no longer appropriated property (wealth) from one group in order to give it to another group that did not earn it. However, this would not be an impossible goal to achieve if the government would concentrate expenditures on what the founders intended: Protection of individual rights and property (which would include funding for the courts and military). Such expenditures do not include entitlements which have become sacred today, like Social Security and Medicare.