This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 10, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's natural to expect soaring rhetoric asking us to sublimate our self-interest

to serve collective interests.

At Cato Institute Executive Vice President David Bose says both

major party candidates for president are asking us to engage in causes greater than

self rather than lives devoted to ourselves and

our individual hopes and dreams.

Barack Obama gave the commencement address at Wesleyan University over Memorial Day weekend and I heard

the address on C-SPAN radio and I heard him going on and on to these graduates about how

they needed to get involved in activism and

community service and there was never a mention of the idea that they might go

into business and produce things and produce things and that volunteering or

community service might be part of their lives but not their entire life.

The focus was entirely on making your job and your career something in the nonprofit world.

You and I have made our careers in part in the nonprofit world?

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with doing it.

It's just that I thought it was odd that there was no mention of the fact that America is built on business, that most of these people will probably go into business. There was no discussion of the fact

that it wouldn't be possible for Barack Obama's wife to make hundreds of

thousands of dollars in a community relations job at a great university if it weren't for somebody

producing the wealth that pays for that. So that's why I thought it was an

unbalanced discussion. I also thought it was interesting that it was the day before

...