When touting his policy successes, President Obama tends to lapse into “we” speak. You know, “we’re building wind turbines and solar panels and bio-diesel plants” or “we want to invest in . . . high-speed rail and broadband.” The “we,” of course, is a small number of enlightened government bureaucrats dispensing our tax dollars with all the aplomb of a hedge-fund manager investing in the next big thing.

In getting so “we, we”-ed up, our president betrays an arrogance common among progressives. It is perfectly reasonable, this reasoning goes, to expect a GS-15 government careerist to (1) use tax dollars and government regulations to manipulate entire sectors of our economy, (2) do it adeptly, and (3) create more wealth and jobs than would be produced by millions of self-interested investors, consumers, and small-business owners acting independently in the private sector.

It is these career government bureaucrats, after all, who must look out for us little people and protect us from the predatory, heartless free-market forces that seek to destroy us. The president explained all this recently to a rapt audience of labor-union members in Milwaukee.

Republicans, he explained, “just don’t want to give up on that economic philosophy that they have been peddling for most of the last decade. You know that philosophy — you cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; you cut all the rules and regulations for special interests; and then you just cut working folks loose — you cut them loose to fend for themselves . . . What it really boiled down to was . . . you were on your own.”

Cut us loose? To fend for ourselves? On our own?

Oh, the horror, the horror of it all.

With this rhetoric — now part of his stump speech whenever he addresses economic issues — the president clearly hopes to tap into what he believes is an underlying sense of financial insecurity on the part of most Americans. The great financial meltdown of 2008 and 2009, he no doubt believes, left an entire generation scarred and more receptive to the helping hand of big government than any generation since the Great Depression.

Happily, that is not the case. Americans remain a self-reliant people who instinctively question the wisdom and competence of government to guide and shape our lives.

In the economically tumultuous days of April 2009, when 401(k)s and home values were plummeting and pink slips flew, the National Journal and the Allstate Insurance Company commissioned a poll to learn what factors most influence us when we make financial decisions for ourselves and our families. If ever a poll was timed to comport with an administration’s security-blanket agenda, this one should have been it. After all, the widespread and seemingly random economic damage then rampant across the land almost seemed designed to cause even the most resilient free-marketer to question the wisdom and viability of the free-enterprise system itself.

But that’s not what the pollsters found. National Journal summarized the findings as follows:

Even amid the most disruptive economic downturn since the Great Depression, a substantial portion of American adults continue to see personal action, rather than government intervention or business decisions, as the best means of improving their economic security. More poll respondents picked personal initiatives, such as doing a good job or investing more carefully, than any other option when asked how they might better manage the challenges of financing retirement, maintaining a secure income, and accumulating assets.