The U.S. government is the dominant player in the global arms market. An existing literature emphasizes the many benefits of an international U.S.-government arms monopoly including: regional and global balance, stability and security, the advancement of U.S. national interests, and domestic...

The provision of public goods is often used to justify the state. Since many highly-valued goods such as education, national defense, roads, etc., possess some public characteristics (i.e. non-rivalry and non-excludability), standard theory predicts such goods will be underprovided by private...

We stand at a critical juncture in U.S. foreign policy. The challenges facing the United States and the world are unique, myriad, and perpetual. We provide a playbook for the national-security elites for how to efficiently run wars. This playbook is intended only for the political elites. Great...

This paper traces the roots of police militarization in the United States to a variety of foreign military interventions, including WWII and the Vietnam War. We analyze how these earlier conflicts, in conjunction with the subsequent War on Drugs and War on Terror, contributed to 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...

This paper analyzes how foreign interventions can result in a broadening of government powers and a concurrent reduction of citizens’ liberties and freedoms domestically. We develop an analytical framework to examine the effects of coercive foreign interventions on the scope of domestic...

Private individuals and policymakers often utilize prohibition as a means of controlling the sale, manufacture, and consumption of particular goods. While the Eighteenth Amendment, which was passed and subsequently repealed in the early 20th century, is often regarded as the first major...

While many costs of war are obvious and recognized, the full domestic consequences are often understated or overlooked. War making — both preparations for war and the act of war itself — provides an avenue through which constraints on governments are either weakened or ignored, allowing for...

This paper explores the "ratchet effect," which is a theory of government growth. The underlying logic is as follows. During a crisis, both the magnitude (or “scale”) and the range (or “scope”) of government activities grow, relative to before the crisis. After the crisis subsides, some...

What is the connection between mass surveillance and institutions of individual agency, freedom, and self-governance? Recent literature on “surveillance capitalism” argues that over the past two decades, the capitalist system has been transformed by Big Tech companies, which have commodified...