This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, September 14, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What should our military's obligations entail?

Should we devote so much of our military budget to defending countries wealthy enough to defend

themselves?

Chris Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and author of the book

The Power Problem, addressed that issue for those gathered at Cato University on Capitol Hill.

When I talk to generally right of center audiences, whether you call yourself a Libertarian, a Classical Liberal, or a good old-fashioned

conservative.

Most of the talks that you have heard up to this point and that you'll hear, for example, on Thursday, talk about the size of government,

the growth of government, how the founders were very fearful of how a growing government would impede

individuals liberties and and I think there's general agreement among people who share this broad tent on the center right, Cato included,

that most of the things that our government does and most of the things that it spends money on

are unwise, are wasteful, or unnecessary, harmful, etc. etc.

There usually is an exception for military spending.

Now, one of the reasons why this is, and I tackle it very directly in the book,

in the power problem book, is that of all the things that our

government does defending us is one of the few things that we actually agree that it

should be doing right this is one of the few genuinely

public goods. Public goods is a term that's thrown around a little too recklessly in this town,

but defense, strictly speaking, is the prototypical public good, right?

If we've learned nothing from our basic economics class, and I am not an economist,

...