The notion that the state is a product of a social contract is an important factor in legitimizing the state; therefore, etatists cling to this theory with all their might, despite the fact that, for instance, the stationary bandit theory explains reality far more accurately. A bandit indeed behaves like a bandit, whereas no one has ever seen a social contract, nor can anyone produce its text.
You may have heard about the laws against sexual violence recently adopted in several European countries, known as “No means no.” Their essence is that sexual abuse (violence) is now considered not only the commission of “lewd acts” amidst active physical resistance by the victim (when she uses all possible strength to fight back), but any resistance where she unambiguously makes it clear that she wants to leave. Among Russian social media users, these laws were received ambiguously and were mainly used as an excuse to once again mock “Gayrope” for having lost all traditional values. Nevertheless, there is common sense in these laws. All criticism should be directed at the states in these countries, which, as always, will distort the essence and apply these laws with bias.
Let’s return to the state. I think a significant portion of people, most likely more than half, would similarly like to say “no” to the state. However, the bureaucrats in power are not fools either; they intuitively understand game theory and do everything possible to ensure that for an individual, any expression of discontent carries the highest possible costs, while the benefit from such a request should be zero! Look, even a request as trivial for the state as building waste processing plants instead of simply dumping trash in landfills remains unanswered. The authorities understand—if you concede such a trifle, in a couple of years they will demand the recognition of the right to create their own sovereign jurisdictions. The cattle must clearly know that they will get nothing, while the costs will be enormous (sleeping in tents near Shies in the freezing cold and constantly being hit on the head with clubs is not exactly like going to a picket line once).
It is exactly the same with the “social contract”—every person understands perfectly well that they alone can do little to change the status quo (depriving the state of its territorial monopoly on governance), but they will get into deep trouble if they start complaining. And so they nod along with the stationary bandit, like a fragile girl with a rapist, even though in their soul they fiercely hate him!
Therefore, I suggest that fans of the “social contract” stop mincing their words and say it straight: “They are raping you, and you aren’t resisting? Then how is that violence; it’s completely voluntary!”
I would like to present to your attention a translation of an article by Mike Mazarr, dedicated to modern approaches to the United States’ deterrence doctrine regarding other states. The author works at the RAND Corporation and previously served in Naval Intelligence.
The article is interesting in that it departs from rather primitive notions of deterrence based on game theory and focuses on methodological subjectivism, which is so valued by proponents of the Austrian school. Therefore, libertarians should find the content of the article easy and pleasant to digest, and for my part, I have tried to make the reading even easier and more pleasant by significantly simplifying the rather ponderous language of the article.
By the way, I have collected all the translations, which were scattered across my site, into a general section; feel free to use it.
I’ve been thinking about how to illustrate the “porridge from an axe” strategy as applied to government people to move closer to ancap, and it seems the only working option is flirting with the idea of separatism. Local leadership, of course, would be happy not to depend on Moscow, and then the task is broken down into small pieces, and campaigns begin for the redistribution of taxes and powers from the center to the localities and so on. But perhaps it would be more interesting to show the strategy by pitching ideas not to officials, but to the people.
As is well known, left-wing sentiments prevail in Russia, and the key idea of the left is equality. Great, let’s cook some porridge out of equality.
Let’s start by exploiting such a wonderful base human quality as envy. If my own cow was taken away, let the neighbor’s be taken too. Not long ago, there was a pension reform where the retirement age for citizens was raised by five years. But not for everyone. Employees of security agencies and several other categories still retire early. To begin with, one could demand that their retirement age also be raised to the same age to ensure equality. If you can’t serve in the FSB at 50, that’s no reason to retire; just transfer to a civilian job and work until the end. The saved funds should be demanded to be divided among all pensioners, so the measure looks sufficiently populist.
Furthermore. If the pension amount for ordinary citizens is determined by how much they paid into the pension fund, then for privileged categories, it is a percentage of their salary. This is an irregularity; down with privileges, let’s have accruals for everyone according to a single formula!
If these measures, which do not put the state directly under attack, can be pushed through, the people will smell blood, and it will be difficult to stop them further. I will outline the remaining steps in dotted lines; the order of their implementation may change anyway.
Abolition of in-kind privileges, such as free public transport, official transport for high-ranking officials, official apartments, and the like. Everything should be folded into the salary for greater transparency and ease of administration.
Abolition of the prosecutor’s office. If the state needs a representative in court, let it hire a lawyer on general terms, rather than keeping a special staff of officials for this purpose. And to initiate lawsuits for various violations, shoulder straps are not needed at all; citizens can handle this themselves, personally or through public organizations.
Abolition of military conscription. Wagner is fighting for Russia anyway, so let it do so officially, along with Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Chopin, and other fine fellows providing their services on the market. For a locksmith with a mortgage, a competitive choice of employers is definitely more profitable than a single PMC, which moreover operates under the table.
Abolition of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. How is the police better than the Cossacks, Serba, and other guardians of traditional values and citizens’ peace? The municipality will figure out for itself whom to hire to guard the peace on the streets. And as for forensic experts—how are they better than laboratory employees who perform paid analyses for citizens? Down with inequality!
Sale of state property. Why is some official disposing of the people’s assets? Seize and redistribute! We sell state property and divide the proceeds equally among all citizens.
And so on. The entire sequential dismantling of the state is perfectly performed under left-wing slogans of equality and justice, and most importantly—there is no need to scare anyone with scary ancap.
In the twentieth century, citizens achieved the most victories under slogans of equality. This includes the movement against segregation in the USA, anti-colonialism, and feminism. And in Russia, social protests are often quite successful. So why not start using this energy in a more useful channel instead of simply branding leftists?
By the way, speaking of bayonets: the right to bear arms is also about equality
Well-known Ukrainian ancap Vladimir Zolotorev gave a lecture in which he supported a minarchist program of state transformations, including nationalization. This is something to see!
In general, I am glad that people, having quickly decided on the question of “Who is to blame,” are focusing on the question of “What is to be done,” while remaining within the framework of more or less realistic ideas about the capabilities of society and social organizations.
or He who says he hates the state simply doesn’t know how to cook it
Thanks to Bitarkh for the idea of the article
There is a fairly common negotiation strategy that I know as the Napoleon principle: ask for the impossible, and you will get the maximum. I can’t speak for Napoleon, but today it is practiced, for example, by Trump, and it is also loved by various terrorists who have taken hostages. This strategy is good, but it has one small flaw: it only works when applied from a position of strength. Therefore, when some political activist comes forward with maximalist demands addressed to the state, the first thing I do is calculate what they can threaten if the demands are not met, and usually, I immediately get bored. Empty demands are ignored at best, and punished at worst.
If your negotiating position is weak, it is far more appropriate to apply the opposite strategy, which could be called the “porridge from an axe” strategy, because it is well illustrated by this fairy tale:
A soldier was returning home from war and asked an old woman for a place to stay for the night. She let him in. He asked for something to eat, and she replied that she had nothing herself. Seeing an axe, he said: light the stove, bring the pot, we are going to cook porridge from an axe. She was surprised and did as requested. The water boiled, the soldier tasted the water and asked for salt. Then for grains. In different versions, there were other requests for ingredients; finally, the porridge was enriched with butter, served on the table, and eaten with appetite. As for the axe, the soldier either took it with him to finish cooking and eating, or left it with the old woman along with similar instructions.
If the Napoleonic strategy is used by terrorists who have taken hostages, then “porridge from an axe” is used, conversely, by the negotiators who talk those terrorists into submission. The strategy boils down to gradually wheedling out small concessions, and it is based on the assumption that the second party will incur costs not only from fulfilling the request, but also from refusing it. Another assumption is that the second party must have a larger goal and must believe that a series of small deals leads them toward that goal. If the soldier had not lured her with the promise of porridge from an axe, but simply asked for access to the stove, firewood, water, a pot, salt, and so on, he would have received a firm refusal somewhere at the salt stage, as in, “boiling water is enough for you.” Similarly, a terrorist will release hostages bit by bit if he is convinced that this advances him toward his stated goal, and not simply because he was asked.
In negotiations with representatives of the state, it makes sense for libertarians to use exactly this strategy. That is, one needs to find out what goal a specific official is pursuing, and then begin offering them small steps that should lead them toward that goal in exchange for giving up positions on some things that are not principled for them.
We will develop this topic in the next article.
Let’s assume that I dyed the soldier’s hair black and his forelock gold)))
Ancap-chan, in her post about LPR and security forces, lamented that in a direct confrontation with the state, the libertarian party behaves not in accordance with its public rhetoric about what ought to be, but like ordinary peaceful law-abiding citizens. One can talk as much as they want about the state being a bandit, about the aggressor’s sanction that allows for the removal of government officials without trial or investigation, and so on, but as we see, this does not translate into a real program of action and likely will not.
Why does this happen? Most would probably say that people are “simply intimidated and afraid to push their luck,” “the state is stronger,” and other such nonsense. But the government of the Russian Empire was by no means a cute bunny and far exceeded Putin’s in terms of cruelty. Nevertheless, it was opposed by determined fellows with their own often suicidal doctrine of individual terror. This was an incomparably greater extremism than the behavior of modern Russian oppositionists, who do not even dare to do what is widely practiced in modern Hong Kong—for example, go out into the street in a mask, shine a weak laser in a policeman’s eye, and then flee unidentified.
Political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann constantly speaks of a global trend toward the reduction of violence and the strengthening of security values. According to Inglehart’s values map, Russians are particularly characterized by values of individualism and security; therefore, it is not surprising that their behavior is so different from that of the residents of Hong Kong, who embrace values of development. Thus, we will have to build our struggle strategies based on this fact. If we want to create a mass resistance movement against the stationary bandit, the methods it uses must be as non-violent as possible.
As we wrote in previous articles, the meaning of the deterrence doctrine is to increase the costs of initiating violence for the aggressor. In this regard, it does not matter exactly how the costs are increased for officials and security forces. But since we want to create a mass campaign (so that as many people as possible participate), the methods must be maximally non-violent, and the necessary actions for participants (the level of difficulty) must be the simplest.
Such a means, of course, is a service for the de-anonymization of officials and security forces. Alexander Litreev launched a project with similar goals called “Russian Elephant,” but only the first name, last name, and photo of security personnel who showed cruelty are added there. Not even a home address. Litreev positions his project as “absolutely legal” (which should be read as: “obeying all orders of the stationary bandit”), so it will have no serious impact on the state. It is foolish to hope for victory by playing by the rules of the bandits, which they write for themselves.
To truly increase the costs for stationary bandits, I envision a service roughly like this:
1) It is implemented as a website but operates under TOR, like all darknet sites such as Hydra. This provides maximum security while maintaining ease of use. The TOR browser is already installed for many people (enough to download and launch, everything works “out of the box”) on all platforms (Windows/Linux, Android/iOS). Despite known cases of .onion site hacks followed by the installation of malicious scripts for user de-anonymization, all of these were carried out by the FBI, CIA, and NSA. Uncle Sam, of course, is just as much of a stationary bandit as Pynya, but he will never help Pynya crush his opponents. Thus, even a bare TOR browser without additional anonymization tools (VPN, disk encryption, Linux instead of Windows, accessing the network via an anonymous phone and SIM card), TOR provides practically 100% anonymity against local guardians of stability, i.e., against the FSB. A low entry barrier will allow for the attraction of the maximum number of people, even those who are not technically savvy. This also greatly simplifies development (it is created as a regular website and then hosted on .onion).
2) The website collects a database of officials and security forces of all ranks, posting absolutely all information that could be found—first name, last name, residential addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, the wife’s place of work, connections with mistresses, car license plate. We are deterring bandits, so obeying their own “law”/order “On the Protection of Personal Data” is the height of absurdity!
3) The site is populated by concerned users. The entire database is in open access, and its snapshot is posted daily for offline download (so it is not lost if the FSB manages to seize the server). Data appears on the site after verification by moderators to exclude the intentional entry of people not involved with stationary bandits.
4) Each profile of an official or security officer will have crowdfunding (like on Kickstarter) to conduct a campaign to “increase the costs of aggression” (retribution) against that person. People will contribute bitcoins, suggest options, carry out retribution, and send a report to the moderators. If everything is correct, the executor will receive all the money from the fund of that official/security officer. Similarly, one can motivate the collection of data on a specific official (home address, car number, mobile number, etc.).
5) Only non-violent methods of retribution are permitted (killing or causing physical harm to health is forbidden). It is forbidden to list the children of officials and security forces as objects of retribution. In this way, the creators of the service cannot be portrayed to the public as ruthless terrorists, and the bandit’s relatives will not be as enraged as in the case of his death, while those who would like to replace him will be pleased. Here are examples of permissible methods of retribution: posting flyers with photos in the entrance, writing on the door, filling the lock with glue, writing on the car, reporting something to the wife’s workplace, filling the apartment with odorant, splashing with zelyonka. Impermissible: smashing a head, breaking legs, splashing with acid, setting the apartment on fire. Always remember: deterrence is not war!
As you can see, this service does not require the use of violence and is easy to use, which gives good chances of attracting a large number of people.
The libertarian eagle is anonymized and safe; the bandit is deprived of such luxury
Many have expressed optimism regarding the recent series of searches of LP members, claiming that this is a mark of quality and a sign that the party is on the right track. I would say that today, repression against political activists is not a sign of fear among those in power, but rather a businesslike scurrying, carried out with a cold heart and without much thought. The grass has grown—it is time to mow. Meanwhile, the grass may comfort itself with the thought that the more it is mown, the thicker it grows.
To be honest, I had a vague hope that since the LP differs from other parties in its radical rhetoric of freedom, this would also be reflected in its behavior in the face of repression. It was not. Protest as performed by the LP is just as legalistic as that performed by Navalny. When security forces burst into a libertarian’s home, they leave just as intact and with the loot as if it had been an ordinary Navalny volunteer or an employee of Open Russia.
So, if anyone believes that Russian libertarians are grim, armed anarchists who will not let themselves be stepped on, or that an attempt to break into one of their homes will immediately trigger a spontaneous rally under their windows—they will have to part with these harmful illusions. Libertarian ideas are not so deeply rooted in the libertarian community that rhetoric regarding the state has translated into practical actions against it.
After all this, I even feel somewhat awkward discussing what the libertarian doctrine of action is in the event of one aggression or another: such discussions begin to look very irrelevant.
Therefore, in this post, I am not providing recipes, because I do not know them. I do not know how I would behave if I were a member of the libertarian party, against whose elected leader blatant state aggression has been undertaken. For me, this is a serious reason to continue refraining from joining the party. I fear that if I begin to declare my views openly, then when the state reaches me—which will happen quickly—I will find myself alone before its functionaries, and at most, I will receive a few pickets in my support.
Please be responsible for your words; there is already too much empty chatter in the world. If you do not feel the resolve to bite the boot that tramples you, do not raise the banner with the motto “Dont Tread On Me.” It is better to hide your libertarianism than to openly discredit it.
A question from the Telegram channel Right Argument, accompanied by a donation of 124 rubles. And yes, if you were wondering how advertising could be bought on my channel—this is roughly how it would look.
The reasons for apoliticism can vary, but they usually boil down to the fact that a person pointedly places their immediate self-interests above some abstract values, and therefore doesn’t consider politics to concern them in any way. Thus, we need to show the person how state redistribution and state social welfare jeopardize their self-interests. And for that, in turn, we need to understand what those interests consist of.
The most common type of apolitical person who approves of state intervention is the one who simply doesn’t want to bother thinking about all this nonsense. The state doesn’t trouble their head with taxes because the employer acts as the tax agent, yet people receive some pensions, study, get medical care, and occasionally receive some benefits. Various loud words about the state robbing someone have as much value to such a person as any annoying advertisement. If someone tries to convey this information, it means they expect to make money from it. Maybe the State Department is paying them, or maybe they’ll start extorting donations now.
In this case, it’s best to sprinkle in anecdotes of two types from time to time. The first: how a certain mutual acquaintance successfully evades taxes, made money on Bitcoin investments, or settled a complex issue within state jurisdiction through a private contact—and so on. The second: how someone was fleeced for extra money through property taxes, had some entitled social payments withheld, or had their business seized in favor of the “brass,” and so forth. In short, provoke cynicism toward the state in the person—essentially, that all the fairy tales about the state being necessary for people are written for suckers, while self-respecting gentlemen will, of course, grab a piece of the state if given the chance, but seriously rely only on themselves and other respected gentlemen.
The second type of apolitical statist is encountered much less frequently. This is a calculating guy who has all the necessary benefits and social payments, considers receiving them entirely fair, and will most likely gladly provide consultation on various nuances of welfare. Having grown accustomed to the unpredictability of politics, he doesn’t bother his head with who is there or what they promise before elections, or how one politician is better than another. You simply need to be in the state’s good graces and do what is approved by the current authorities.
Here, it makes sense to encourage such “entrepreneurship,” but remind them that when everything collapses, it’s important to know how to pivot. In the Soviet Union, trade workers were in favor, but in the early nineties, most of them turned out to be professionally unfit for the new conditions. Today’s trade workers slave away and don’t look anything like the former privileged stratum. So, when social welfare ends, it’s important not to end up on the street as a useless specialist in obtaining benefits; it would be good to have other competencies.
Fortunately, such people usually don’t need long convincing that social welfare will sooner or later collapse. Since he is consistently in the black, he knows deep down that no free ride lasts forever.
Of course, there are many other varieties of statists, but I have listed specifically those who are apolitical. If you encounter statist political activists, that’s a completely separate conversation, but that’s a whole other story.
There is a certain charm to kitchen conversations, since they successfully survived the USSR
And as a postscript, I’ll briefly share my impressions of the channel Right Argument. I would say that this young resource is still forming its own style, so the channel looks somewhat eclectic. Initially, the authors apparently assumed they would ask themselves questions, answer them, and result in a fairly concise catechism for communicating with leftists. But now the channel has expanded beyond the original intent and has begun to intersperse arguments with reactions to the current agenda. So now it can also be used as a source of those very life anecdotes that are so useful for kitchen conversations.
In many plays staged in ancient theater, an unusual technique for resolving character conflicts was often used — “Deus ex machina” (“God from the machine”). It consisted of the sudden appearance of a new god-like character on stage at the end of the work, who had not been mentioned previously in the performance and had the ability to quickly resolve the heroes’ problems. Simply put, external forces solved the heroes’ problems without delving into the essence of the conflict. This technique is suitable not only for works of art, but can also be useful for political transformations aimed at the destatization of society.
Let’s look at any libertarian public page on social media, chat, website, stream, podcast, or channel. What will we see? Most likely, an endless discussion of the same topics — how libertarian courts work, who will build roads under ancap, contractual slavery, abortions, the agency of children, nuclear weapons, drugs, the Austrian School of Economics versus Keynesianism and state planning, minarchism versus ancap, ancap versus panarchy, territorial communities versus ECUs. Often, this boils over into an endless holy war, where people spend many days in a row defending their point of view.
But the thing is, if you argue endlessly among yourselves and spend all your resources on it, you won’t achieve much! And is it even necessary? Perhaps there exists a single universal recipe for how to resolve all these problems at once and spend our scarce resources for the benefit of the movement?!
Yes, it exists and is found in the very nature of the state — a stationary bandit can conquer a society only when the balance of violence potential (BVP) is disrupted, while when this balance is maintained, a stateless society exists quite stably, as proven within the methodology of neo-institutionalism. You can hear about this briefly and clearly in the first part of Alexander Auzan’s lecture “Evolution of the Stationary Bandit.” After the formation of centralized coercive structures (the state), movement in the opposite direction toward a decentralized society becomes impossible without applying external effort to the system (this pattern is analogous to the second law of thermodynamics: heat will not spontaneously transfer from a colder body to a warmer one).
If we restore the BVP, the costs of initiating violence become higher than the costs of defense, and the territorial monopoly of the state simply disappears. Beyond that, everything else simply doesn’t matter! Of course, it is better to know the answer in advance as to who will build roads or how to determine the agency of children, but even without that, people will have no choice but to solve this without the state. It simply cannot exist when the BVP is maintained. If you are a programmer or simply know Boolean logic, you understand well: after calculating the value of the first operand in a conjunction (&&), you don’t need to calculate all the other operands if it is FALSE, as the result of the conjunction will be FALSE anyway. Or for a disjunction (||), you can skip calculating the other operands if the first is TRUE, because the result will be TRUE anyway.
It follows that a sufficient condition for the transition to libertarianism is merely bringing the violence potential in society to a more uniform distribution. As you have probably already guessed, this can be achieved by creating and spreading tools for the doctrine of deterrence (DD).
The advantage of this approach is that the development, production, and implementation of DD tools into wide use can be carried out by a much broader circle of people than those currently involved in political campaigning and protest actions. Co-opting techies who can assemble a drone, a blinding laser, or other interesting tools from freely available parts to fight the regime is far more promising in terms of expanding the protest base than limiting recruitment to humanities scholars and economists who are well-versed in the nuances of ideology. Even more useful is the involvement of engineers and managers capable of organizing the mass production of such items, which is also a very numerous category. It should also be noted that semi-cottage production or writing a software product is easily hidden from the state and is therefore safer than attending rallies, which serves as an additional stimulating factor.
When reliable, mass-produced, and inexpensive tools for deterring aggressors are available even to a grandmother, it won’t be long before the “market decides” the fate of the state. After the deus ex machina does its work, all of today’s theoretical disputes about how to organize under ancap will abruptly move into the practical plane. We observed something similar relatively recently, when economists argued about whether it was possible to return to the gold standard in the era of fiat money, and then Satoshi arrived, and now instead of the gold standard we have the bitcoin standard. That’s it, the subject of the dispute has vanished; the agenda is now the widespread practical implementation of private hard money.
Everything is clear with the economy — it’s based on blockchain. But what about the ideology? Not in terms of party differences, but how to self-organize? Who produces politics?
Gastello
If there is no state, by what laws will criminals be judged? And who will issue the laws?
Bvl72
From the perspective of the state’s creators, it must be a monopoly on legitimate violence and a monopoly on making final decisions. This is required to perform the two key functions of the state: robbery and arbitrary rule, namely taxation and rule-making. And while in the economic sphere it is generally clear that it is better without robbery than with it, and that any economic benefits the state strives to provide would be provided better and cheaper by a private individual in a free market, many reach a deadlock regarding rule-making: who will ensure that everyone follows a single set of rules?
Fortunately, this problem does not need to be solved. Rules do not have to be uniform; they have to be convenient. The concept of rules is embedded in humans literally at a biological level. Even young children develop rules for playing in a sandbox. The more established a company becomes, the clearer and more developed its rules are. Rules appear in any chat or other club, and people actually appeal to them with even greater seriousness than to state laws, because state laws are for lawyers to study, while people need the rules themselves.
Rules can exist as text or simply as a set of assumptions. Compliance with rules can be monitored by a specially appointed moderator, or simply by everyone. Rules can be immutable, or they can be regularly revised. For breaking the rules, one might be expelled from the collective, hit on the forehead with a candelabra, or have an eleven-meter penalty kick taken against them. But what would definitely not occur to anyone without a state is to collect absolutely all rules into a single code, from football and preferance to the order of taking out the trash and washing dishes in the family.
Nevertheless, for greater efficiency in creating rules, certain general principles are usually laid as the foundation for their composition. For example, if there are different roles in a collective, different standard powers may be provided for them, but within a single function, it is more convenient for its holders to be subject to the same norms, whether it be football or organizing production. When organizing a competition, it is appropriate to ensure equality of conditions for the competitors, whether it be preferance or an auction. It is appropriate to explain existing norms to a newcomer, and until they have mastered them, it is appropriate not to hold them to the full severity of the rules, whether it be an internship in production or mitigated criminal penalties for teenagers. If a judge is appointed to monitor compliance with rules, they must not have an interest in the process they are judging, or they must not have the right to judge themselves.
The question of what happens if different groups have different rules is also contrived. The rules of football and chess do not conflict; each is created for its own game, and if a football player and a chess player go to a bar, they follow the rules of behavior in a bar. If it suddenly turns out that people are in a situation where there are no rules, or everyone is used to following their own, they either try not to bother each other or they develop common norms. For instance, newlyweds quickly set aside what their own parents taught them and form their own norms. For instance, meeting on a mountain path, people look at each other and silently decide who will press against the rock and who will squeeze past them closer to the cliff. For instance, farmers will agree among themselves how long to wait for the owner of an abandoned plot to appear before it is appropriate for a neighbor to claim it, and how to proceed if the previous owner does appear afterward.
But, of course, in a complex and global world, uniform norms can certainly exist for millions of people, or even for the entire population of Earth. For example, popular languages have hundreds of millions of users; very few connector standards for external devices connected to computers have taken hold worldwide, and there is only one markup language for web pages. Global rules can be quite detailed, and their development can be handled by entire consortia involving many companies. Such standards will be followed simply because it is more convenient.
Some sensible norms are also contained in the existing legislations of individual states. Some of them will continue to exist after the state, if using the ready-made ones proves more convenient than developing them from scratch.
Bet you can come up with great rules for the game in this picture in five minutes?
