I understand where you are coming from, but I don’t regard that Athenian System nor the Communes of the early Church as Socialism. They were based on voluntary sharing, not on confiscation, and only worked (for a short time) because of a universally shared belief system which does not exist today.

Neither were stable systems, and neither would work today. I’ve read Plato’s Republic and it was certainly not a Socialist ideal — very much the opposite.

Thanks for an interesting discussion, anyway.