Why do you consider "the rich" and "the government" as two separate entities? Now that we have made some advances in network theory, perhaps it would be better to think of the social relations of political economy as an intricate network, rather than simply two lumps -- the economy as separate from the state. At the height of laissez-faire, in Rockefeller and JP Morgan's days, the government was intervening to squash strikes, granting land to railroads, even invading other countries for the benefit of specific American companies.

There's no us and them. It's all just us.