Over the last 40 years or so we have too often heard from the champions of unregulated free market capitalism that “the government can do no right”. Or that “the magic of the market is always the best and proper answer to every problem.” Or the so called ‘joke’ “I’m from the government and I am here to help you.”

With respect to the above, I suggest we honestly consider what the “magic of the market place” has wrought and whether or not we want more of it. Considering that a first class economy requires a first class communications infrastructure, and that, as Paul Krugman wrote in his op-ed “French Connections” of July 23, the US private sector has failed to deliver this, while at the same time blessing us with global climate change, I have to wonder.

The deep insight in Krugman’s article was not that one sector is better than the other, but that the only way forward is to form something greater than the sum of the parts out of the imperfect parts we have: the public sector and the private sector working together. For too long, our strength has been sapped and our status in the world degraded by the false dichotomy of the private sector vs the public sector. Neither sector has perfect knowledge. As a result, both sectors make lots of mistakes all of the time, and always will. But they work better for all of us when they work together than when they tear us apart fighting over dogmatic and ideological constructs. Especially when those constructs are false. The evidence of the price we pay for the ideological warfare of the public vs the private is obvious: global climate change, inferior infrastructure, bandwidth scarcity, energy dependence, etc.

Isn’t it past time to try some new approaches that give us the benefit of being greater than the sum of our imperfect parts? The benefits of collective gain from collaboration at the edges, as David Reed so aptly describes it?

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