 Many philosophers believe that there is something morally defective about a private society. One type of defect bears especially on the case of a private society that consists of rational egoists. As I noted in the last section, a community of rational egoists will not perform the actions necessary to generate public goods. Since these goods are desirable, the absence of public goods may be suboptimal, both from the standpoint of aggregate welfare and from the standpoint of each member’s egoistic  rationality.[7]  So there are good instrumental reasons for people to create a public agency—i.e., a state—that can use taxes, subsidies and coercive threats to draw people into mutually beneficial patterns of  cooperation.[8]