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by Matt Wolfson
Jul 24, 2025
If spending on war is the politically easiest way to juice an economy, then the smoothest applications for this spending are wars at home, the easiest to begin and to control. This is why, at an accelerating rate since the 1990s, America’s government has waged wars against Americans—domestic pushes against real threats created from Washington policies that Washington then uses to expand its power. These wars range from the War on Crime to the Global War on Terror to a “War on Unauthorized Immigration,” one which will not break from past precedent but turbocharge it.
Familiar players created these scenarios. It was President Bill Clinton who made a growth industry from a war on crime begun three decades before off tensions of urban development. He did this even as he laid the groundwork for Islamist terrorism by embedding American troops in Saudi Arabia and responded to his financial backers’ demand for cheap labor by averting his eyes from crossings at the southern border. It was Kamala Harris who as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General made her name fighting Clinton’s War on Crime and filling the federally-funded prisons that came with it. Then, after 2020, she helped Joe Biden’s administration turn a war on terror against Muslims into a war on terror against “white nationalists.”
But they were working off an even earlier template. “Crime is a national defense problem; you’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” said Harris’s future boss, then-Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 1984. The rolodex of scares may turn, but the politicians turning it stay the same. And even more lasting than the politicians are the industries and sub-industries which grow up around them: weapons contractors and security consultancies and private prisons and surveillance companies. Together they create a domestic version of our military industrial complex: an empire of Halliburtons at home not just abroad.
Some of this domestic complex has come about through militarized policing, and through comprehensive crime bills like those in 1984 and 1994. The former allowed local police forces to access information, air surveillance, equipment, and training from defense and intelligence agencies and the military, creating fields of “urban surveillance” and “social control.” The latter allowed them to expand their equipment and hiring sprees by allocating $10.8 billion for state and local law enforcement. This had real effects; for example, Rodney King’s violent arrestfor evading a speeding stop at the hands of twenty-three Los Angeles police officers while an LAPD helicopter circled overhead. New York took longer to profit from federal funds, but from 1993 to 2000 its police budget went from $1.7 billion to $2.9 billion, marijuana arrests rose from under 10,000 to 60,000 in the same period, and summonses for illegal vending increased by 40% in a single year. The results, too, took longer to percolate than in Los Angeles, but they eventually did via the Black Lives Matter protests, which took their fuel from police brutality, of the 2010s.
Then there were prisons. In 1980, the prison population was 200,000; in 2010 it was 1.6 million; starting in 1995 $9.7 billion in federal money flowed to states across the country to build more prisons. In Texas, the state incarceration rate was 182 people for every 100,000 in 1978 and 710 people for every 100,000 in 2003. About 770,000 people worked nationwide in the corrections sector by 2008, even as there were 880,000 workers in the entire auto manufacturing sector. Then, as federal funding moved on after the financial crash, privatization occurred. According to the criminal legal reform nonprofit The Sentencing Project:
[more in article]
The Pentagon added 76,000 peoplebetween 2001 and 2014, among them employees of the Office of Total Information Awareness, which began in 2002 and continues in different forms today. The focus of the office and its successors is combating terrorism using “computers, cameras, location-sensors, wireless communication, biometrics, and other technologies…to track, store, and analyze information about individuals’ activities.” Observers of both Total Information Awareness and its manifestations today have called it“the closest thing to a true ‘Big Brother’ program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States.”
[more in article]
This project culminates, for now, with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. $168 billion in this bill for a period through 2029 goes to ICE, on top of the $33.93 billion ICE already receives via congressional appropriations, which is already more than twice as much granted to all other enforcement agencies (FBI, ATF, Secret Service, DOJ, DHS, DEA) combined. $46 billion of this $168 billion goes to “border wall operations in the U.S.-Mexico border.” $45 billion goes to detention centers—a 365% increase from the current sum allocated of $3.4 billion, “and a figure that outstrips the combined funding of all 50 federal prisons.” $29.9 billion “goes toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations.” The employment opportunities here—from staff to construction to policing to transportation—are astronomical, and considerably easier to create than bringing back manufacturing jobs with complex negotiations over tariffs.
Even before the Big Beautiful Bill, and as with the Wars on Crime and Terror, states are already benefiting from government largesse. The most prominent example is Florida, which, on July 1, celebrated the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz.” This is the “tent city-type facility” in the heart of the Everglades with “28,000 feet of barbed wire…200 security cameras…staffed by 1,000 and guarded by 400 more.” Costing $450 million to operate each year, Alligator Alcatraz will be paid for by the federal government, a boon to Florida—but state-run holding facilities will not be the main beneficiary of the deportation boom. In the Sentencing Project’s report on the privatization of prisons, it notes that, from 2000 to 2016, “the proportion of people detained in private immigration facilities increased by 442 percent.” According to Greg J. Stoker, drawing from a report by Gabriel Eskandari:
[more in article]
And it’s not just private immigrant detention centers; private surveillance has been another area of growth. Perhaps not surprisingly, the government’s most helpful partner this year so far has been Geo Group, which:
[more in article]
But this may not be as surprising as it might seem. Trump’s career was made, as journalist Daniel Denvir has pointed out, by New York’s 1980s building and finance boom. This boom was created by government-backed financiers, who took over city government in the late Seventies and began implementing the policies that within a decade would begin creating America’s domestic wars, including New York’s own wars on crime and terror. These players were practitioners of what we know today as neoliberalism: the so-called “privatization” of government that was anything but, since government simply stepped up subsidizing corporate vendors for services while increasing spending on security. Despite superficial differences from the Clintons and Harris, Trump comes from their world, and now he’s turbocharged it. Once again, in 2025, the state begins healing when politicians “bring the war home.”
Full article:
libertarianinstitute.org
by Matt Wolfson
Jul 24, 2025
If spending on war is the politically easiest way to juice an economy, then the smoothest applications for this spending are wars at home, the easiest to begin and to control. This is why, at an accelerating rate since the 1990s, America’s government has waged wars against Americans—domestic pushes against real threats created from Washington policies that Washington then uses to expand its power. These wars range from the War on Crime to the Global War on Terror to a “War on Unauthorized Immigration,” one which will not break from past precedent but turbocharge it.
Familiar players created these scenarios. It was President Bill Clinton who made a growth industry from a war on crime begun three decades before off tensions of urban development. He did this even as he laid the groundwork for Islamist terrorism by embedding American troops in Saudi Arabia and responded to his financial backers’ demand for cheap labor by averting his eyes from crossings at the southern border. It was Kamala Harris who as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General made her name fighting Clinton’s War on Crime and filling the federally-funded prisons that came with it. Then, after 2020, she helped Joe Biden’s administration turn a war on terror against Muslims into a war on terror against “white nationalists.”
But they were working off an even earlier template. “Crime is a national defense problem; you’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” said Harris’s future boss, then-Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 1984. The rolodex of scares may turn, but the politicians turning it stay the same. And even more lasting than the politicians are the industries and sub-industries which grow up around them: weapons contractors and security consultancies and private prisons and surveillance companies. Together they create a domestic version of our military industrial complex: an empire of Halliburtons at home not just abroad.
Some of this domestic complex has come about through militarized policing, and through comprehensive crime bills like those in 1984 and 1994. The former allowed local police forces to access information, air surveillance, equipment, and training from defense and intelligence agencies and the military, creating fields of “urban surveillance” and “social control.” The latter allowed them to expand their equipment and hiring sprees by allocating $10.8 billion for state and local law enforcement. This had real effects; for example, Rodney King’s violent arrestfor evading a speeding stop at the hands of twenty-three Los Angeles police officers while an LAPD helicopter circled overhead. New York took longer to profit from federal funds, but from 1993 to 2000 its police budget went from $1.7 billion to $2.9 billion, marijuana arrests rose from under 10,000 to 60,000 in the same period, and summonses for illegal vending increased by 40% in a single year. The results, too, took longer to percolate than in Los Angeles, but they eventually did via the Black Lives Matter protests, which took their fuel from police brutality, of the 2010s.
Then there were prisons. In 1980, the prison population was 200,000; in 2010 it was 1.6 million; starting in 1995 $9.7 billion in federal money flowed to states across the country to build more prisons. In Texas, the state incarceration rate was 182 people for every 100,000 in 1978 and 710 people for every 100,000 in 2003. About 770,000 people worked nationwide in the corrections sector by 2008, even as there were 880,000 workers in the entire auto manufacturing sector. Then, as federal funding moved on after the financial crash, privatization occurred. According to the criminal legal reform nonprofit The Sentencing Project:
[more in article]
The Pentagon added 76,000 peoplebetween 2001 and 2014, among them employees of the Office of Total Information Awareness, which began in 2002 and continues in different forms today. The focus of the office and its successors is combating terrorism using “computers, cameras, location-sensors, wireless communication, biometrics, and other technologies…to track, store, and analyze information about individuals’ activities.” Observers of both Total Information Awareness and its manifestations today have called it“the closest thing to a true ‘Big Brother’ program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States.”
[more in article]
This project culminates, for now, with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. $168 billion in this bill for a period through 2029 goes to ICE, on top of the $33.93 billion ICE already receives via congressional appropriations, which is already more than twice as much granted to all other enforcement agencies (FBI, ATF, Secret Service, DOJ, DHS, DEA) combined. $46 billion of this $168 billion goes to “border wall operations in the U.S.-Mexico border.” $45 billion goes to detention centers—a 365% increase from the current sum allocated of $3.4 billion, “and a figure that outstrips the combined funding of all 50 federal prisons.” $29.9 billion “goes toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations.” The employment opportunities here—from staff to construction to policing to transportation—are astronomical, and considerably easier to create than bringing back manufacturing jobs with complex negotiations over tariffs.
Even before the Big Beautiful Bill, and as with the Wars on Crime and Terror, states are already benefiting from government largesse. The most prominent example is Florida, which, on July 1, celebrated the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz.” This is the “tent city-type facility” in the heart of the Everglades with “28,000 feet of barbed wire…200 security cameras…staffed by 1,000 and guarded by 400 more.” Costing $450 million to operate each year, Alligator Alcatraz will be paid for by the federal government, a boon to Florida—but state-run holding facilities will not be the main beneficiary of the deportation boom. In the Sentencing Project’s report on the privatization of prisons, it notes that, from 2000 to 2016, “the proportion of people detained in private immigration facilities increased by 442 percent.” According to Greg J. Stoker, drawing from a report by Gabriel Eskandari:
[more in article]
And it’s not just private immigrant detention centers; private surveillance has been another area of growth. Perhaps not surprisingly, the government’s most helpful partner this year so far has been Geo Group, which:
[more in article]
But this may not be as surprising as it might seem. Trump’s career was made, as journalist Daniel Denvir has pointed out, by New York’s 1980s building and finance boom. This boom was created by government-backed financiers, who took over city government in the late Seventies and began implementing the policies that within a decade would begin creating America’s domestic wars, including New York’s own wars on crime and terror. These players were practitioners of what we know today as neoliberalism: the so-called “privatization” of government that was anything but, since government simply stepped up subsidizing corporate vendors for services while increasing spending on security. Despite superficial differences from the Clintons and Harris, Trump comes from their world, and now he’s turbocharged it. Once again, in 2025, the state begins healing when politicians “bring the war home.”
Full article:
Domestic Militarization is Trump’s Economic Plan | The Libertarian Institute
If spending on war is the politically easiest way to juice an economy, then the smoothest applications for this spending are wars at home, the easiest to begin and to control. This is why, at an accelerating rate since the 1990s, America’s government has waged wars against Americans—domestic...
libertarianinstitute.org
