Uncle Sam is good to Maryland, buying more than $20 billion a year in goods and services and employing almost 126,000 workers earning $9.4 billion. State and local governments add more than 300,000 workers who make almost $14 billion. State and local governments add billions more in procurement. That is wonderful in one sense, but government billions must not blind us to the need to nurture private-sector enterprises that actually generate the wealth for governments to tax.

Government can be wonderful. It can, at its best, enable much. But it produces nothing. What government does do is take money from people who produce wealth and spread it around.

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