Is the state necessary? In this week’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon follows Aeon J. Skoble’s argument that we can do without the state and finds there is much to like in Skoble’s logic.

"77 percent of [Republicans] support the war, on average. But that’s exactly what we’d expect for almost any Trump policy."

When someone argues in favor of state control of economic processes, they are, by definition, presenting an argument based upon the ad baculum fallacy, the “appeal to force.”

Big infrastructure projects in the developing world for things like water and electricity are under-pressure. Chinese and US funding is down and these projects often fall apart due to corruption and political incentives to build but not maintain. It is possible to break old institutions and establish new ones, but “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Connor Tabarrok gives a great example. Ek Son Chan in Cambodia:

In 1993, the Phnom Penh Water Supply Authority was a catastrophe. The city was emerging from decades of war and genocide. Only 20 percent of the city had connections at all, and water flowed for just 10 hours a day. 72 percent of the water was non revenue water. It was lost to leaks or stolen through illegal connections.

Into this mess walked Ek Son Chan, a young Cambodian engineer appointed as Director General. Over the next two decades he executed an incredible institutional turnaround.

Chan replaced corrupt managers with qualified engineers. He got rid of unmetered taps. Every single connection received a meter and was billed. The old system of manual billing was replaced with a computerized system, which cut down on low level employees giving out free water and receiving kickbacks. Bill collection rates went from 48 percent to 99.9 percent. These changes were intensely unpopular, and Chan faced fierce resistance from rent seekers, from freeloading customers to his own employees. He established an incentive system based on bonuses among the workers, introduced an internal discipline system with a penalty for violators, and set up a discipline commission for all levels of the organization to deal with corruption

He divided the distribution network into pressure zones with flow monitoring. A 24 hour leak detection team walked the streets at night with listening bars to identify underground leaks.

The institutional change dwarfed the infrastructural change, but was absolutely necessary to make the infrastructure investment worthwhile….

This commitment would not be untested. When Chan tried to enforce bill payment on Cambodia’s elite, and sent his team out to install a water meter on the property of a high ranking general who had been freeloading. The general refused the installation of a meter, so the team attempted to disconnect the water. The general and his bodyguards ran them off the property. When Chan heard of this, he decided not to back down, and mobilized his own team to dig up the pipe and install the meter. Always a leader from the front, Chan jumped in the hole to take a shift at digging. When he looked up, his team had fled, and he was facing down the general himself, pointing a gun at his head. In Cambodia in the 90s, consequences for such a high ranking official were unlikely. CHan didn’t give up. He mobilized the local armed police and returned with 20 men to standoff against the general, disconnected him from service and left him out to dry. Chan said this about the dispute:

”He had no water. My office was on the second floor and the general came in with his ten bodyguards to look for me. I said, “ No. You can come here alone, but with an appointment”. He couldn’t do anything. He had to return. He said, “Okay”! At that time we had a telephone, a very big Motorola. He came in to make an appointment for tomorrow. I said, “ Okay, tomorrow you come alone”. So he comes alone, we talk. “Okay. I’ll reconnect on two conditions. The first condition is that you have to sign a commitment saying that you will respect the Water Supply Authority and second, you need to pay a penalty for your bad behavior and you must allow us to broadcast the situation to the public, or no way, no water in your house”. So he agreed. “

….By 2010, coverage in the city went from 25 percent to over 90 percent with 24 hour service. The utility became financially self sustaining and turned a profit. It was listed on the Cambodia Securities Exchange in 2012. Chan won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2006.

By separating the utility company from the low-capacity local government, Ek and PPWSA proved that:

• Functional infrastructure relies on institutional quality and mechanism design.
• State capacity need not exist within the state

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The post A New Order of Things appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

There is a peculiar irony in modern American consumer culture: we celebrate abundance, low prices, and convenience—until we decide to sue the businesses that make those things possible.

Somewhere along the way, buyer beware—a principle as old as markets themselves—has been replaced with the belief that disappointment equates with legal injury. Disputes over marketing messages and lawsuits about the labeling of menu items shows that some patrons are eager to become plaintiffs. Recent skirmishes over chicken are a case in point.

Issues Over Additives

Costco is facing litigation over its famously affordable $4.99 rotisserie chicken. Plaintiffs argue that the marketing language, describing the product as “preservative free,” is misleading because the ingredient list includes sodium phosphate and carrageenan. Both of these ingredients are common food additives, and, when used together, they enhance texture and aid in moisture retention. Sodium phosphate and carrageenan are FDA-approved and widely used in products ranging from deli meats to donuts, but it seems for some that these additives are clearly a cause for concern.

Costco’s rotisserie chickens are noticeably larger and juicier compared to what is available at other grocery stores, and the additives are likely part of the reason. It is also worth noting that at $4.99, Costco’s chicken is cheaper per pound than other rotisserie offerings, which also likely have sodium phosphate and carrageenan included as ingredients.

Due to its affordability and quality, Costco’s chicken has achieved a cult following, and just last year, Costco sold 157 million rotisserie chickens. That is a massive number, but these chickens aren’t a money maker—they are a loss leader, much like Costco’s $1.50 hot dog combo deal. The chicken is priced low to get people in the door, and clearly it works. If customers felt misled, they would stop buying. Yet sales remain strong, demonstrating that revealed preferences should matter more than retrospective offense. Most Costco shoppers understand that the rotisserie chicken’s pricing is part of a broader strategy to deliver value at scale.

Lawsuits Over Semantics

In Costco’s case, the plaintiffs feel as though they have been duped, but in reality, they are just being dumb. And the same can be said of the plaintiff in the recently dismissed case against Buffalo Wild Wings.

A lawsuit was issued against Buffalo Wild Wings (BWW) back in March 2023. The charge: misrepresentation in calling a popular menu item “boneless wings,” when in fact the product is made from chicken breast rather than literal wing cuts. BWW responded to the lawsuit by tweeting: “It’s true. Our boneless wings are all white meat chicken. Our hamburgers contain no ham. Our buffalo wings are 0% buffalo.”

Everyone knows that boneless wings are glorified chicken nuggets and that the sauce they are typically tossed with has no connection to buffalos. The sauce’s name is derived from the location it was created, in a bar in Buffalo, New York, and boneless wings were a more modern invention to respond to the rising costs of the bone-in variety. In fact, traditional wings have a humble history and weren’t even considered worthy of being on a menu until the 1960s. But as more bars and restaurants realized customers were fans of the previously neglected cut of meat, flavors and sales took off.

Fast-forward to present day, and the case has finally been dismissed. For the plaintiff, the semantics were lawsuit-worthy, but for the court judge, the case was about common sense. “Boneless wings” can remain on the menu labeled as such, and BWW is not required to pay the plaintiff what was sought after—up to $10 million in damages.

Market Signals and Environmental Shifts

Economically, wings illustrate consumer-driven value creation. Tastes shifted, and branding amplified demand, leading to wing nights, wing eating contests, and March Madness wing orders. Wings are now an inseparable part of American sports culture. Last month, the National Chicken Council’s annual Chicken Wing Report projected Americans would consume 1.48 billion chicken wings during Superbowl LX.

Demand levels and price signals reshaped production for the chicken industry, and chains like Buffalo Wild Wings built entire business models around it. The social and affordable aspect of chicken, however, shifted during the pandemic, and the aftereffects of the COVID lockdowns led to a spike in pricing.

Processing slowed, supply chains stalled, labor shortages occurred, and inventory was depleted. So, when demand rebounded as restaurants, sports bars, and event gatherings began to reemerge, wings were in high demand but short supply. In some markets, wholesale pricing exceeded $3.00 per pound, and bars and restaurants couldn’t shoulder the costs, nor were customers willing to pay such a high price.

Wings are biologically limited—only two per chicken—and since you cannot produce more wings without producing more chickens, many restaurants responded rationally by promoting “boneless wings” instead. Boneless wings offered predictable portioning, lower waste, and stronger margin control given that breast meat is more abundant, scalable, and price stable. When input prices rise, smart firms will reallocate their marketing efforts toward higher-margin alternatives that hopefully satisfy the needs and price points of consumers. Boneless wings are a textbook example of this, and it’s a shame the plaintiff couldn’t appreciate it.

Sales That Serve Communities

In neither of the above cases were the companies acting in a manner to harm customers; actually, quite the opposite. BWW has updated its wings over time to ensure customer satisfaction, and due to the strong connection wings have with sports, the Buffalo Wild Wings Foundation was established to support youth sport culture. Since 2013, the foundation has donated over $28 million to improve access to youth sports, and, in partnership with Boys & Girls Clubs of America, BWW has “provided more than 2 million children the chance to participate in organized sports.”

As for Costco, many families value the rotisserie chicken’s convenience and benefit from its low price. And Costco has also played a proud part in supporting America’s youth by raising $54 million in 2025 for Children’s Miracle Network. Costco has also awarded over 2,700 scholarships and donated 186 million meals to families in need. Even its chickens get donated, and this past year Costco contributed over 140 million pounds of food and other products to Feeding America.

The Consequences of Courtroom Consumerism

What is truly troubling about these cases is not the ingredient list or the menu terminology—it is the transformation of post-purchase dissatisfaction into legal injury. That shift carries consequences given that it redirects company resources toward litigations rather than value creation.

Consumer-facing class actions are costly regardless of outcome. Even weak claims impose real financial and opportunity costs simply by proceeding through the courts. Litigation consumes executive attention, diverts operational focus, and reallocates marketing budgets toward reputational defense rather than innovation and customer service. Companies cannot fully invest in better products and services when they are forced to defend existing ones against speculative or semantic claims.

Affordable food, abundant choice, and everyday convenience do not materialize by accident. They emerge from experimentation, logistical coordination, and by responding to competitive pressures—that is when firms are able to focus on business matters instead of depositions.

The Price Tag of Paternalism: Litigation vs. Learning

When lawsuits hinge on wordplay or personal disappointment, firms respond rationally: they hedge risk, simplify offerings, and avoid creative branding. Consumers ultimately absorb those costs, and the market process becomes one that is determined by lawyers rather than entrepreneurs. To be sure, there is a broader cultural lesson at stake. A society that defaults to litigation signals that responsibility should be assumed as external and outcomes should always be guaranteed. But this is not the way that markets work. Markets do not function on guarantees—they function on feedback, as rightly portrayed by Ludwig von Mises:

In the capitalist system of society’s economic organization the entrepreneurs determine the course of production. In the performance of this function they are unconditionally and totally subject to the sovereignty of the buying public, the consumers. If they fail to produce in the cheapest and best possible way those commodities which the consumers are asking for most urgently, they suffer losses and are finally eliminated from their entrepreneurial position. Other men who know better how to serve the consumers replace them.

No court hearings needed. The market process is made up of fallible individuals—producers and buyers alike—who learn through exchange and determine that which is of value to them. And given that value is subjective, formed in the minds of individuals engaging in interactions, then disappointment is also subjective and cannot alone constitute evidence of wrongdoing.

Markets work because they assume capable participants pursuing their own interests, not perpetual victims leveraging lawsuits.

In the early hours of 6 March, British counter-terrorism police arrested four Iranian men suspected of assisting Iranian intelligence services in surveillance operations targeting London’s Jewish community. The arrests took place in Barnet, Harrow, and Watford, boroughs that together are home to roughly 65,000 Jews, one of the largest concentrations of Jewish life anywhere in Europe. Six others were also arrested in connection with the operation. The arrests are not the first indication of Iranian state activity in Britain, nor will they likely be the last. But they raise an obvious question: why does the United Kingdom still refuse to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation? 

Britain has long faced a diverse array of terrorist threats, and it has often responded with makeshift solutions. Tourists who visit London are often surprised to discover that in the heart of one of the world’s busiest cities there are almost no rubbish bins. Most of them were removed after the Irish Republican Army’s bombing campaigns of the early 1990s, when a bomb concealed inside a bin at Victoria Station killed one person and injured dozens. In 2013, when the City of London reintroduced just twenty bins—this time blast-proof—on a “trial basis” along Bishopsgate in response to littering concerns, the decision made national headlines.

Proscription was intended as a step toward severing the military and ideological support networks that terrorist organisations might cultivate within the United Kingdom. The policy was shaped in large part by the Northern Ireland Troubles, a decades-long conflict between the IRA and British police and military authorities. The IRA’s mass-casualty attacks, particularly its bombings of civilian spaces, eroded sympathy for its cause. On “Bloody Friday,” 21 July 1972, the IRA detonated 22 bombs across Belfast, killing nine people and grievously injuring around 130 others. One year later, Parliament enacted the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1973, expanding powers of search and arrest for anyone suspected of IRA links. Section 10 of the Act, as originally drafted, stated: “Any constable may arrest without warrant any person whom he suspects of being a terrorist.” For the first time in its modern history, Britain had adopted a zero-tolerance stance toward terrorism.

In 2000, Tony Blair’s government enacted a new Terrorism Act. Home Secretary Jack Straw told the House of Commons that its purpose was to help ensure a “safe, just and tolerant society.” The government immediately used it to proscribe twenty-one organisations including al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups. These measures enabled the arrest of many high-profile terrorists. In 2004, police arrested the Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, an al-Qaeda supporter whose documented incitements to violence led to his 2006 conviction for encouraging the killing of non-Muslims, promoting racial hatred, and possessing terrorist materials. Al-Masri is now in prison in the US. 

Without the Terrorism Act, which allows the government to proscribe any group even indirectly “concerned in terrorism,” individuals like al-Masri would walk the streets of Britain freely, publicly recruiting for Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, and the Taliban. Proscription also provides grounds to investigate affiliates, whether they belong to independent militant groups or act as proxies for foreign states.

As the country is a common-law jurisdiction without a written constitution, in Britain definitions are legally important. Lawmakers can spend a lot of time debating the meaning of a single word in a bill. The result is that few words in a statute are ever superfluous—and this is certainly true of the Terrorism Act. In the absence of an internationally agreed definition of terrorism, the Terrorism Act 2000 defines it as the “use or threat of action… designed to influence the [British] government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and… made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, or ideological cause.” The action or threat must involve violence, danger to life, or serious damage, and does not require the perpetrator to be based in the United Kingdom. Under Section 3 of the Act, the Home Secretary can proscribe any organisation that “commits or participates in acts of terrorism, prepares for terrorism, promotes or encourages terrorism, or is otherwise concerned in terrorism.”

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There is hardly an organisation on the planet that satisfies these definitions more completely than the IRGC: a quasi-state militia forged in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, answerable only to the Supreme Leader, and animated by a founding ideology steeped in the cult of Khomeinist martyrdom—a global revolutionary project that openly celebrates the prospect of killing all non-believers. Over the span of four decades, the Sepah-e Pasdaran, as it is known in Farsi, has transformed what began as an assortment of bloodthirsty Islamists into one of the most formidable terrorist networks on the planet, with auxiliaries across the globe.

The new chief of the IRGC, Ahmad Vahidi—wanted by Interpol in connection with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people—previously served as commander of the organisation’s Quds Force, the branch responsible for conducting operations almost entirely outside of Iran. The Quds Force has trained, funded, and directed organisations already proscribed under the Terrorism Act, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaeda. It has also paid members of transnational criminal organisations and separatist movements—including the Foxtrot Network, the Mocro Mafia, and the Polisario Front—to assassinate Israeli, Jewish, and Iranian dissidents in Europe and North Africa.

Iran has targeted senior American officials involved in the Abraham Accords. In his book Never Give an Inch, Mike Pompeo writes that an IRGC operative tried to hire a contract killer to target him. Iranian hitmen almost succeeded in killing Pompeo during his visit to Paris in 2022. As of 2025, the persistent threats against his life from the IRGC remained “serious and credible.” These are the methods of a terrorist regime.

Proscribing the IRGC was a manifesto commitment of the present Labour government and a step its members repeatedly criticised the Conservatives for failing to take. Yet, for Keir Starmer’s government, IRGC proscription has become politically tricky. If he forces it through now, Starmer will undoubtedly be lambasted by the radical Left—particularly by people like Jeremy Corbyn, who once described the proscription of Hamas as a “really big, big, historical mistake” and now leads the far-left splinter group, Your Party. Further complicating matters is the meteoric rise of the Green Party, whose press officer has publicly denied that Hamas committed sexual violence on 7 October and whose controversial Urdu-language election campaign included leaflets urging voters to “punish Labour for Gaza.” Starmer’s advisers may feel that proscription is a vote-loser—even though recent polling by J.L. Partners suggests that nearly two-thirds of the country and almost three quarters of Labour voters approve of the policy.

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The IRGC’s funds are already designated as illicit and subject to counter-terrorism financing restrictions under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018 (SAMLA). Within this framework, the UK has placed over 400 sanctions on Iran, including trade restrictions on materials that the IRGC could use for arms manufacturing. Business Secretary Peter Kyle has argued that given the intensity of existing sanctions, full proscription would be unnecessarily heavy-handed. Critics warn that it could impinge on freedoms of expression and assembly, and might undermine Britain’s ability to maintain diplomatic channels with Tehran’s more “moderate” figures.

These arguments are unconvincing. Sanctions are only as effective as their enforcement by regulators and financial institutions. A 2024 report by Spotlight on Corruption noted that there had been zero fines for breaches of financial sanctions since 2022, zero convictions for sanctions evasion since 2012, and no assets permanently seized through civil or criminal proceedings. Sanctions alone have not prevented two UK-registered companies from running an illicit cryptocurrency exchange that processed nearly US$1 billion in IRGC-linked transactions between 2023 and 2025. Nor have they dissuaded wealthy intermediaries such as Ali Alansari from channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in IRGC-linked funds through British property markets. The £100 million London property network linked to Iran’s reported new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei suggests that Britain’s sanctions regime is hardly functioning as intended.

The Foreign Office may be blocking IRGC proscription on the grounds that it would force the United Kingdom to sever diplomatic relations with Iran, something the bureaucrats oppose. Indeed, The Telegraph has just revealed that on 12 February, Foreign Office staff attended an event at the Iranian Embassy in celebration of the Islamic Revolution, when the regime had already massacred tens of thousands of its own people.

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There are no moderate power centres within Iran’s political system. Even the most hopeful attempts at gradual reform by the carefully stage-managed “reformist” camp were effectively crushed during the Green Movement of 2009. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s current president, is a former IRGC militiaman who served in the Basij forces enforcing the regime’s surveillance and morality codes—a man who has declared war against the West repeatedly in recent months. If this is the sort of moderate voice with whom Labour hopes to conduct its diplomacy, the prospects are grim.

In addition, the sanctions-only approach designates the regime a terrorist actor abroad while tolerating its agents operating at home. As defence analyst Barak Seener notes in his landmark report on the case for IRGC proscription: 

As the IRGC is designated but not proscribed as a terrorist organisation, the absurd scenario has arisen in which one can be convicted for funding the IRGC abroad under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, but cannot be convicted under the Terrorism Act for promoting IRGC initiatives within the UK. 

Much of this absurdity, Seener argues, stems from an overly narrow interpretation of the Terrorism Act 2000. Enforcement has focused on offences committed within Britain’s borders rather than those carried out abroad, even though Section 1(4) of the Act clearly allows individuals promoting IRGC-linked terrorist activity to be prosecuted regardless of where the acts occur.

The government’s current position is that while existing procedures allow for the proscription of non-state or sub-state terrorist actors, designating the military arm of a sovereign state as a terrorist organisation would require additional legal scrutiny, and likely further legislation. This argument is based on a January 2023 report by Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. According to Hall, Parliament would need to amend the Terrorism Act 2000 to distinguish between terroristic and lawful state violence before an organisation such as the IRGC could be formally proscribed.

Yet more than three years have elapsed since Hall’s report and his recommendations have yet to be implemented. During a House of Commons debate on 3 March, the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was asked by her Labour colleague Mark Sewards whether, in light of Iran’s massacre of its own people and its indiscriminate attacks across the region, the government would move to proscribe the IRGC. Cooper’s reply was evasive: “We keep all proscription decisions under close review.” 

Moreover, Hall’s objections had already been undermined when the Wagner Group was proscribed by Rishi Sunak’s government in September 2023. Wagner, a hybrid paramilitary-mercenary organisation with longstanding links to the Russian state, is precisely the sort of state-adjacent structure Hall claimed could not easily be captured under the Terrorism Act. Yet Parliament added Wagner to the list of proscribed organisations, making membership of or support for the group a criminal offence.

If the United Kingdom is ever going to proscribe the IRGC, now is the time to do it. As the Islamic Republic falls into disarray, British military personnel, including at an RAF base in Cyprus, have been targeted in Iranian strikes. The European Union has added the IRGC to its terror list. Australia has listed the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism.

In July 2025, a heavily redacted parliamentary report on Iranian state hostility revealed that the IRGC Intelligence Organisation (IRGC-IO)—the same group recently sanctioned by the US Treasury for managing Iran’s “national campaign of mass violence, arbitrary detentions, and intimidation”—maintains undeclared agent networks in the United Kingdom. MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum has warned that, since January 2022, at least twenty Iran-backed plots have posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens and residents. Meanwhile, the Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale, an IRGC front located a few hundred yards away from a Jewish primary school, openly hosts Hezbollah-themed yard sales. The Ahlulbayt (Shi’a) Islamic Mission—whose senior figures have repeatedly been linked to Iran and which presents itself as a charity despite not being registered as one—nearly succeeded in operating a Khomeinist youth camp. Most recently, twenty-seven Ahlulbayt student societies across Britain issued statements mourning Ali Khamenei. 

So long as the government refuses to proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, the situation will only worsen. Solutions outside of full proscription will do little to prevent Iran from relocating thousands of its most dangerous underground assets within Britain’s borders, where it knows that they cannot be prosecuted for IRGC membership. Should that ever occur, the “safe, just, and tolerant society” Jack Straw once envisioned will have been sacrificed to jihadist thuggery on the altar of political expedience and legal technicality. If the Labour government truly values Britain’s security, it must avoid this.