With the possible exception of the Scottish parliamentarian George Galloway (here he is saluting Saddam Hussein), no other politician in modern-day Britain has been as staunchly socialist as the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone (a.k.a. “Red Ken”). The bane of Lady Thatcher in the 1980s and a fan of Hugo Chavez in the 2000s, “Red Ken” has been a poster child for the British left for decades. As far as he was concerned, no taxes were too high, no government intervention in the economy too excessive. It was with some glee, therefore, that I read that Red Ken is also a bit of a tax dodger – using apparently legal but not very “lefty” ways to limit his tax exposure. But wait, there is more… Ken has recently attacked the plans of the Conservative government to make the National Health Service (NHS is a monopoly public health provider) a little less socialist. “The people of our capital city deserve top quality care and demand our health care should not be broken up, sold off or be privatized by the back door,” he wrote. Lo and behold, it turns out that Red Ken has been benefiting from private health care for some years. Even by the low standards of contemporary politics, this is an extraordinary degree of hypocrisy.

It appears some Republicans want to return to their familiar national security play book in their pursuit of the White House, accusing a Democratic president of gutting defense spending and undermining national security. An Associated Press story predicts that Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign may feature the “hawkish and often unilateral foreign policy prescriptions that guided Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.” But the calls from Republican operatives and GOP hawks for Romney to slam Obama for cutting the military and drawing down in Afghanistan are hollow. Focusing on national security isn’t likely to score Romney any political points. To the extent that foreign policy matters in this election, Romney’s policies are both misguided, and at odds with what the American people want.

For one thing, Romney’s prescriptions for Afghanistan aren’t so different from Barack Obama; where they are different, they are politically unpopular. From yesterday’s New York Times:

For Mr. Romney, the evolving politics of the Afghan conflict suggest that he “wouldn’t get a lot of juice for making the argument to stay,” said Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “The problem he’s got is, how he can criticize the president by adopting a policy remarkably similar to the president. He’s obviously got to criticize him, but he doesn’t have that much to work with.”

But the problem extends beyond Afghanistan. The more Romney talks about “staying the course” in an unpopular war, the more he sounds like the last GOP presidential nominee. John McCain’s campaign boast that he would rather lose an election than lose a war should haunt the party: he delivered neither a political victory for Republicans, nor a military victory in Iraq. Romney’s embrace of the Afghan quagmire could seal the GOP’s fate as the party that happily defies the wishes of the American people in order to fight costly and interminable nation-building missions in distant lands.

On defense spending, Romney’s approach has been “Fire. Ready. Aim.” He has accused Obama of short-changing the military, and pledges to spend at least 4 percent of the nation’s GDP on the Pentagon’s base budget, a promise that would bring spending to levels unprecedented since the end of World War II. Romney has yet to spell out what other spending he would cut, or what taxes he would increase, in order to make up what I estimate to be $2.5 trillion in additional spending over the next decade. Or he could just add to the deficit, as George W. Bush did. Team Obama would be smart to press Romney for clarification.

But Obama himself is to blame for misleading the public about military spending. Although he boasts of having cut $487 billion from the Pentagon’s budget over the next decade, his budget submission for FY 2013 represented only a slight decline below the previous year, and is still above the average during the Bush years. If Obama gets his way, the Pentagon’s budget would rise to near historic highs again by the end of the decade. (For more on this, see here.)

Therefore, far from believing that Obama has gone too far in cutting military spending, as Romney contends, many Americans believe that the cuts could go much deeper. That is the take away from Yochi Dreazen’s story in this week’s National Journal. Noting that we have the biggest and second-biggest air forces in the world (the Air Force and the Navy, respectively) and 11 aircraft carriers to China’s one (which isn’t exactly state-of-the-art), Dreazen quotes an exasperated T.X. Hammes, a professor at the National Defense University, and a 30-year Marine veteran, “the services keep saying that we need to be big. What’s the justification? Based on what threat? I’m just not sure I see the logic.”

A companion story at NJ by George E. Condon Jr. shows that Hammes isn’t alone. A recent Gallup poll found that 41 percent of Americans think we spend too much on the military as opposed to just 24 percent who think we don’t spend enough. It is that latter segment of the population, presumably, that Romney has locked up with his four percent promise. But it is hard to see how his stance will win over the war-weary public that isn’t anxious to repeat our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures, and that isn’t looking to boost military spending, either.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

Politico has a great story about how free-market groups are defeating ObamaCare Exchanges at the state level:

Conservatives like John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute have also been touring states with the platform provided by the American Legislative Exchange Council to help kill off state-based exchanges, a key piece of health reform that will help millions of people purchase insurance coverage — often with federal subsidies — starting in 2014.

“Our approach has to be absolute noncollaboration, civil disobedience — well, not civil disobedience but resistance … by whatever means,” said Graham.

Two years into the law’s implementation, conservative emissaries have contributed to impressive stats. Almost all red states are holding off on exchange legislation at least until the Supreme Court decides on the Affordable Care Act, and in most of those states, exchange-building legislation has crawled to a stop.

I have to point out three problems with the story, though. First, the Cato Institute and I are libertarian, not conservative.

Second, the article identifies Cato, ALEC, and AFP as being “funded partly by the Koch brothers.” Even though these groups have no direct or indirect financial interest in this issue, and even though Cato currently receives no funding from the Kochs, and even though Cato is currently fighting a hostile takeover attempt by the Kochs, I guess that’s a fair categorization. What isn’t fair is how the article fails to disclose that Leavitt Partners has a direct financial interest in this issue: Leavitt is getting paid by states to help implement Exchanges. (See “Health Exchanges: A New Gold Mine,” Politico, June 27, 2011.) It would have been nice if the article mentioned that all the moneyed interests – including health insurance carriers and many Chambers of Commerce – are on the pro-Exchange side. But it at least should have mentioned Leavitt’s financial interest.

Third, I’m not sure what basis there is for saying “most legal experts think” the federal government can offer tax credits and subsidies in federal Exchanges. My co-author Jonathan Adler and I have been following that debate closely. Only a handful of scholars have even commented on the issue, and they are fairly evenly split. If I’m unaware of others who have weighed in, I’d like to hear about them.

In the March/​April issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Republican strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie opened an article titled “How to Beat Obama” with this paragraph:

In an American election focused on a lousy economy and high unemployment, conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy is one of Barack Obama’s few strong suits. But the president is strikingly vulnerable in this area. The Republican who leads the GOP ticket can attack him on what Obama mistakenly thinks is his major strength by translating the center-right critique of his foreign policy into campaign themes and action. Here’s how to beat him.

There are two basic themes here: 1) that the conventional wisdom that foreign policy isn’t a big issue in this election is wrong, and 2) that foreign policy can and should be a winning issue for the GOP candidate. They go on to outline how [Mitt Romney] should try to make foreign policy an issue. Then, oddly, the article circles back around to this paragraph:

Absent a major international crisis, this election will be largely about jobs, spending, health care, and energy. Voters do, however, want a president who leads on the world stage and a commander in chief who projects strength, not weakness.

Now one of Romney’s foreign policy advisers is going on offense, saying that Obama’s approach to strategy could be characterized as a game of “Mother, may I?”

So–should the GOP try to make foreign policy an issue or not? The idea that foreign policy can be a winning issue for Romney was interesting to me, and I criticized the Rove/​Gillespie article here (with Rob Farley) and here in a podcast. So I was intrigued when Chris Wallace asked Gillespie on Fox News Sunday, “In one paragraph, two or three sentences, what’s the choice for voters?” Here’s Gillespie’s response:

The choice for voters is if we are going to have a dynamic pro-growth economy based on free enterprise, that creates jobs, that lifts people out of poverty, that provides upward mobility for someone like my father who was an immigrant, who came to this country and was able to become a small business owner, versus a government-centered society — one that requires, you know, to meet mandates and comply with regulations and fill out forms and seek waivers, and try to get your subsidies, where people in Washington, D.C. are making decisions about how people their spend money, as oppose to free enterprise and personal religious freedom and personal freedom that has made this country great and has helped to create more jobs than anything, any government we’ve ever seen.

Not a word about foreign policy. It will be interesting to see if Rove and Gillespie prevail on Romney and get him to try to make foreign policy an issue. Beyond inchoate laments about Obama not understanding American exceptionalism, not “leading” and nonspecific rhetoric like that, I’m betting they won’t.

The most important development this week in Latin America is the decision of the Argentine government to seize control of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), the country’s largest oil company. On Monday, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced the expropriation of the controlling stake of YPF that is owned by the Spanish company Repsol. The Spanish government, backed by the European Union, has announced that it will take retaliatory measures against Argentina, noting that “all options are on the table.” The Economist Intelligence Unit has a very good analysis on the case and the implications for Argentina.

The big question after Fernandez’s overwhelming reelection last fall was whether she would deepen the economic model she and her late husband (and predecessor) implemented since arriving to power in 2003—marked by high government spending, tight economic controls on industries, and selective nationalizations of businesses—or instead change course given the growing signs of exhaustion: high inflation, growing fiscal deficit, increasing capital flight, fall in foreign direct investment, the weakening peso, etc.

Any doubt is now gone. With the nationalization of YPF, Argentina firmly joins Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia in the club of Latin American nations that espouse high-octane economic populism. In the upcoming months, we can expect more protectionist measures, further controls on the economy and, once the government runs out of the money that it seized in the past three years from the private pension funds and the Central Bank’s reserves, we should not be surprised if it moves to take control of the banks.

Things will only get worse for Argentina.

Charles Kolb is president of the Committee for Economic Development and was a domestic policy adviser to Bush the Elder. Over at Huffington Post, he articulates why (he thinks) the Constitution’s Commerce Clause empowers Congress to force people to purchase health insurance, but not broccoli. That is to say, he offers (what he thinks is) a limiting principle that (he thinks) would enable the Supreme Court to uphold ObamaCare’s individual mandate, but still leave some constraints on Congress’s ability to force people to buy things. Like broccoli.

Yet Kolb’s proposed limiting principle is no more a limiting principle than Harvard law professor Noah Feldman’s proposed limiting principle, because the two make the same argument. Almost verbatim. So rather than regurgitate my response to Feldman, I’ll just link to it.

Okay, I’ll regurgitate this part:

Like every other so-called limiting principle offered by ObamaCare’s defenders, Feldman’s[/Kolb’s] has no basis in the Constitution or any other law. It is a post hoc rationalization, made by people who are shocked to find themselves before the Supreme Court, defending the constitutionality of their desire to bully others into submission.

Couldn’t resist.

The Tax Foundation reported that Tuesday was Tax Freedom Day (TFD), which is the day that Americans stop “working for the government” through their tax payments and start working for themselves.

TFD is calculated by taking total federal, state, and local taxes and dividing by national income to get a ratio representing the share of income that the average person pays in all taxes. That ratio is applied to the 365-day calendar. This year the ratio is 29.2 percent, which translates into April 17 for TFD. Time to party!

But maybe not quite yet…

When I worked at Tax Foundation in 1993, I mailed a letter to Milton Friedman asking about his view on TFD. He kindly responded with a letter and a 1974 Newsweek article in which he proposed a “Personal Independence Day.” That day would be based on total government spending, which is larger than total taxes, and thus our day to celebrate freedom from the government hasn’t yet arrived this year.

In his letter to me, Friedman stressed that total spending is the important variable in assessing the burden of government: “If government spends an amount equal to 50 percent of the national income, only 50 percent is left to be available for private purposes, and that is true however the 50 percent that government spends is financed.” And while some economists focus on how government borrowing may “crowd out” private investment, Friedman said, “What does the crowding out is government spending, however financed, not government deficits.”

In its TFD report, Tax Foundation includes a supplemental calculation looking at spending. The thinktank figures that Americans will work until May 14 this year to be free from the burden of federal, state, and local spending. The Foundation is lacking a snappy name for that important day, but now we are reminded that Friedman has already suggested one. 

Friedman hoped that “Personal Independence Day” would complement our national Independence Day of July 4. The latter is the day we celebrate independence from the “Royal Brute of Britain,” as Tom Paine called him in Common Sense. But for Paine and the other Founders, the deeper goal of July 4, 1776 was to create a limited government to ensure the maximum space for the exercise of individual freedom. As Paine noted, private “society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”

So Milton Friedman’s Personal Independence Day can be our annual reminder that while our forefathers gave the boot to the “crowned ruffians” of Old Europe, we’ve still got work to do in limiting the power grabbing of our own elected ruffians in Washington.