Milton Friedman was the leading public proponent for an all-volunteer military. This chapter traces his influence upon the national debate over conscription, which culminated in Friedman’s service on the Gates Commission. Friedman's argument relied on economic reasoning and appeal to...

National defense is the textbook example of a public good. In order to understand how economists present public goods to undergraduates, we analyze 50 texts from across three widely taught undergraduate economics courses: principles of economics, intermediate microeconomics, and public finance....

In 2018, the total strength of the Armed Forces (AF) of the Russian Federation did not change. Early in February 2018, the President of the Russian Federation increased by 200 persons to 10,740 persons the ultimate staff number of the Central Office of the Ministry of Defense (without the...

Restitution scholars are almost unanimous in rejecting the term quasi‐contract. This essay challenges this view. It begins by demonstrating that many debates among restitution scholars are in fact debates about the boundaries of consent‐based liability. This serves as an introduction to the...

This article argues the case for empires. They provided global order in the nineteenth century. Their dissolution in the twentieth century resulted in global disorder. A blind spot in the classical liberal tradition was its assumption that international order would be a spontaneous by-product of...

1 Economic Aspects of National Security -- 2 A Historical Perspective: How National Security Became an Economic Issue -- 3 Economic Elements in Israel’s National Security Doctrine -- 4 Defense Economics Issues in Israel -- 5 Measuring Defense Expenditures -- 6 Israel’s Defense Expenditures...

The book describes the social costs of conscription in the Netherlands using methods from Public Finance and Law and Economics. This analysis shows that both the tax for the population, or the subsidy for the armed forces, and the lack of scarcity considering human resources caused by the draft,...