President Obama said this in his 2nd inaugural address:
For the American people can no more meet the demands of today's world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we'll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together.I object to this move, which seems to have become popular with Democrats in the past couple years, of equating "doing things together" with government. To suggest that anyone who'd like to see less heavy-handed government regulation thinks one person can do everything alone is a straw-man argument. It indicates a lack of understanding of how the private-sector economy works and how libertarians or conservatives actually think about economics.
As Matt Welch pointed out in his critique of the speech, making and selling an object as basic as a pencil is so complex that it takes many specialists. No one person has the knowledge to accomplish that seemingly simple task; that's how decentralized information is in our society. With a truly complex product, like a computer or a movie or a building, the need for people to work together is even greater still.
The private sector isn't about everyone being secluded and isolated from each other; it involves many people working together. And government regulation often rules out the options people would otherwise want to pursue that would let them work together more.
The idea that you're "acting alone" unless you're being directed by the government strikes me as dehumanizing and almost abusive. So I resist the scare tactic of presenting government as the alternative to being "alone."
