All governments are potential police states. Constitutionally constrained democracies are no exception, as demonstrated by America’s post-9/11 experience. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. government expanded its domestic police powers in the name of protecting the...

Following the start of the war on terror in 2001, U.S. policymakers determined that winning the war on drugs in Afghanistan was necessary for winning the war on terror. Yet despite spending $8.4 billion on drug interdiction in Afghanistan since 2002, opium production has grown substantially. We...

Economists model state-provided defense as a value-added, public good. The actual government provision of defense, however, is a “black box” that is rarely analyzed. This chapter contributes to opening this black box by analyzing the U.S. defense budget. We provide an institutional...

The fatal conceit of foreign intervention refers to the limitations faced by governments using discretionary power to address perceived problems in foreign societies. Drawing on evidence from the “Afghanistan Papers”—a collection of internal government documents compiled by the Special...

This paper analyzes the “revolving door” phenomena in the military sector in the United States. The revolving door refers to the back-and-forth movement of personnel between the government and private sector. We examine the structure of the revolving door and explain how its very nature...

State-provided defense is a form of non-comprehensive government planning subject to two inherent problems. The first is the “knowledge problem” of how to allocate scarce resources to their highest-valued uses. The second is the “power problem” due to the discretionary power granted to...