This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 17, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When Barack Obama talks about doing things together, as he did last week in Rome,

in Rome, Virginia, he appears to presume that it

requires government institutions to leverage individual efforts.

That kind of vision leaves very little role for civil society. So says Aaron Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute.

It's probably worth saying at the outset that some of what Barack Obama said in Roanoke was taken out of context and is being used to make

points that he himself was not really intending to make and you take actually ignoring

the part that was taken out of context you take on another

portion which is President Obama says the point is is that when we succeed we

succeed because of our individual initiative but also because we do things together.

There are some things like fighting fires we don't do on our own.

I mean imagine if everybody had their own fire service,

that would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Right, he's correct that we accomplish most good things by working together.

I mean, all he's describing in that first bit is division of labor and trade. We don't all do things individually. We work

together and we pool our resources and we specialize in what we're good at and

we sell that to other people or we voluntarily help each other.

So he's absolutely correct there.

He's not correct in the characterization of the fire departments though.

I mean if that were true, if his argument about the fire departments were true I mean if that were true if his argument about the

fire departments were true then everything that wasn't done by government which is

...