Not many people today call themselves, or describe their positions as, socialist. There are a few redoubtable figures—including the initial inspiration for this book, the late G. A. Cohen—but their small numbers might make one wonder why one should bother writing a book addressing them. The answer is that although few people call themselves socialists, a large proportion of people endorse policies—and indeed, a political worldview—that is what I will call socialist-inclined. Socialist-inclined policy is that which tends to prefer centralized over decentralized economic decision making. It also tends to distrust granting local people or communities a wide scope to organize themselves according to their own lights, especially when their decisions conflict with larger, preferred corporate or social goals. It tends to prize material equality over individual liberty and is willing to limit the latter in the service of the former, and it tends to hold that self-interest is either morally suspect or can be eradicated from (or at least significantly diminished in) human behavior by the proper arrangement of political, economic, and cultural institutions. A great number of people, regardless of party affiliation, fall somewhere along those continua in the directions of socialism. The argument of this book applies, therefore, to all those policies, beliefs, and positions that are socialist-inclined, even if not avowedly “socialist.”