The president of the Partnership for New York City, Kathryn Wylde, has a letter to the editor in the adjacent column accusing us of “singling out the governor as a beneficiary of rent stabilization” and calling on us to “cut the governor some slack.” Well, we’d be happy to cut the governor some slack — as soon as the government he heads starts cutting the taxpayers of this state some slack.

As things now stand, Mr. Paterson and a few other lucky individuals pay below-market rate rents for rent-stabilized apartments, but taxpayers in New York are cut not a scintilla of slack when it comes to their income tax and property tax payments. Nor are the majority of New Yorkers who live in market-rate properties that they own or who pay market-rate rents cut any slack by their landlords or by those from whom they bought their homes.

RELATED: Paterson Pays A Stabilized Rate of Rent | Paterson’s Rent

Why, for instance, should someone who earns less than Mr. Paterson and his wife, but pays more in rent or mortgage to live in a smaller apartment, cut Mr. Paterson any slack at all? When it comes to paying taxes, the governor cuts the taxpayers of the state not a molecule of slack, not a quark or gluon of slack. On the contrary, he raised taxes on cigarettes and on book purchases from Amazon.com, even though New Yorkers already bear one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the nation.

As for the idea that we are “singling out” Mr. Paterson, it’s specious. We’ve been marking this issue since before many New Yorkers had even heard of Mr. Paterson. In the first issue of our New York Sun, on April 16, 2002, we ran a front-page news article noting that even the editorialists at the New York Times, in a 1996 editorial, wrote that “Rent regulation has not served New York City well. It has discouraged investment in the upkeep of old properties and the construction of new ones.”

Quoth the Times: “The laws hurt the entire city by reducing the tax base. An expensive and extremely cumbersome state bureaucracy is required to implement them. Especially galling, the laws create an irrational system in which some well-to-do tenants pay very little rent for large apartments while less-prosperous newcomers are forced to pay rents that are artificially inflated by the shortage of market-rate housing.”

In other words, this isn’t a liberal or conservative issue but a common sense one. Since 2002, we’ve returned to the theme repeatedly. In a July 8, 2005, editorial, “Cyndi Lauper’s Rent,” we noted that the 1980s pop-music icon was enjoying a four-bedroom apartment on West End Avenue at a government-fixed rent of $989 a month. In a December 5, 2005, editorial, “Boomerang,” we recalled actress Mia Farrow’s $2,900 a month, 11-room apartment on Central Park West. In an October 23, 2007, editorial, “Bianca Jagger’s Rent,” we applauded a court ruling that the ex-wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger was not entitled to a rent-stabilized apartment on Park Avenue in addition to her London residence.

Just yesterday came two reminders of the absurdity of the rent-regulation system. The Times reported that the new owner of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, Tishman Speyer, had found hundreds of tenants keeping rent-stabilized apartments in Manhattan even though they maintained other residences elsewhere. Among the examples cited in the Times was a tenant who was a television news anchor who lived in Kalamazoo, Mich., and another who owned property in Florida and Maryland.

Why should the New York City taxpayers who live in market-rate housing subsidize second homes for those with below-market rents? Mr. Paterson, we have noted, owns a home in Guilderland, upstate, as well as having access to the 40-room governor’s mansion in Albany, on top of his $1,250-a-month two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in a doorman Manhattan building.

Meanwhile, the Brooklyn real estate Web site Brownstoner.com reports that 100 Clark Street, a handsome brick building at the corner of Clark Street and Monroe Place in Brooklyn Heights, “was partially torn down” in an emergency demolition over the weekend. According to Brownstoner, the owner “had a strong financial incentive not to step in sooner to save the building. Why’s that? Because condemnation was the only way to get free and clear of the three remaining rent-stabilized tenants.”

The Web site reported that three tenants in the building were enjoying Brooklyn Heights apartments for rents of $550, $617, and $575 a month. As one Brownstoner commenter put it, “If the law makes it profitable for a landlord to destroy” the landlord’s own building, “that law should be changed.”

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We don’t mind saying here that we have enormous respect and affection for Mr. Paterson, whom fate has dealt a difficult hand politically. We want him to succeed. But the way to help him is not to cosset him with special rent breaks that ordinary New Yorkers resent so much but to support him in an effort — if he is prepared to lead it — to get rid of a bankrupt system of rent control and stabilization. That the spokeswoman for the city’s business community, Ms. Wylde, is seeking to cut the governor some slack is a symptom of the mindset that has enabled the New York City Rent Stabilization Law declaring an “acute housing emergency” to fester since 1969. Nearly 40 years of government regulation have failed to alleviate the emergency or to achieve the “transition from regulation to a normal market of free bargaining between landlord and tenant” that was touted as the law’s objective. Is it too much to ask leaders of the city’s civic life to stop cutting this system slack and to start working toward reform?