The Community of Harmonious Optimization is a mid-sized, safe nation, renowned for its barren, inhospitable landscape, compulsory military service, and irreverence towards religion. The hard-nosed population of 89 million Harmonious Optimizationians are prohibited from doing almost everything except voting, which they do timidly and conservatively.

The enormous, moralistic, socially-minded government juggles the competing demands of Defense, Law & Order, and Education. The average income tax rate is 73.8%, and even higher for the wealthy.

The sizeable but sluggish Harmonious Optimizationian economy, worth 2.49 trillion dollars a year, is driven entirely by a combination of government and state-owned industry, with private enterprise illegal. The industrial sector, which is quite specialized, is led by the Arms Manufacturing industry, with major contributions from Automobile Manufacturing, Door-to-door Insurance Sales, and Woodchip Exports. Average income is 27,992 dollars, and distributed extremely evenly, with little difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Citizens are remarkably well involved in the political process, the nation operates a "finders-keepers" policy with other nations' citizens, thieves claim they're simply working for the tax agency, and the government pours millions of dollars into rehabilitation programs annually. Crime, especially youth-related, is totally unknown, thanks to the all-pervasive police force and progressive social policies in education and welfare. Harmonious Optimization's national animal is the armadillo, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation.

Harmonious Optimization is ranked 311,157^th in the world and 59^th in QA nerds for Nudest, with 5.5 cheeks per square mile.