One of the jokes of our era is the Republican Party's claim that it favors “small government.” An accurate description might go more like this: the present-day Republican Party (libertarians excepted) has never seen an oppressive power of the national security state it didn’t want to bolster or grow. And it loves big government -- the bigger the better -- as long as we’re talking about the military-industrial complex. Mitt Romney, for instance, is eager to build ever more naval vessels, increase the size of U.S. ground forces, and up by an extra $2 trillion or more over the next decade the Pentagon’s already staggering budget.