> If I get sick, I will be taken care of. By the community. Socialism (miniscule s) in the small is charity, forms of which even the most rigid egoist (e.g. Ra

> If I get sick, I will be taken care of. By the community. Socialism (miniscule s) in the small is charity, forms of which even the most rigid egoist (e.g. Rand) can find ideologically palatable: intentional, contractual communities are communities nonetheless, and generally contain mutual aid clauses. Scale matters, however, and somewhere between 150 and 100 million other persons, the charity co-ordinating entity (i.e. the governing power) becomes a beast unto itself, the contract becomes blurred, and Socialism in the large imposes itself on ideological dissenters with the force of the local violence monopolist. If nation-states were actually communities caring for their own, the philosophical concerns of consent and compulsion, and the pragmatic concerns of checks and balances, would be much reduced. I await the Maneki Neko experiment that could imbue a society of great magnitude with equally great cohesion.