To the editor:

George Will’s right-wing attack on Elizabeth Warren puts words in her mouth she doesn’t agree with (Journal-World, Oct. 6). She clearly supports individual initiative and enterprise as well as obligations for the successful to support government investments that enable success. She  supports moderation of tax rates as well as taxation based on ability to pay. She supports individual autonomy and self-regulation as well as government’s duty to rein in the exploiters among us. She supports the creative complexity of private society as well as the ability of “we the people” working together to “form a more perfect union.”

Warren is simply asserting facts of life from microeconomics 101:

1. Production of goods and services always depends on three kinds of inputs: capital, labor and government services.

2. Revenues from production must be shared as profits, wages and taxes, or else all three factors will cease to exist.

3. Hence, taxes are necessities of civilized life.

Here is Will’s entire defense for misinterpreting Warren: “Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context,” and “Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable (is) that the individual depends on cooperative behavior of others.” Note Will’s exquisite delicacy: government is described, accurately enough but evasively, as “social context” and “cooperative behavior.” Note also that no major Republican candidate in the last 30 years has made any public reference to these facts. Will is claiming Warren is an extremist, because she states simple facts the radical right denies.