In his recent defense of socialism, Corey Robin writes:

The socialist argument against capitalism isn’t that it makes us poor. It’s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.

Brad DeLong has replied that the need to please others “is not a problem with ‘the market’: that is a problem with the need we have for a complex division of labor in order to be a rich society, in the context of the very human fact that people will not be eager to deal with you as a cooperative partner if you are a misanthropic grouch.” Indeed, the idea that others will have a say over your life applies to all societies, including socialist ones.

To see why, consider a society that has implemented a system of collective ownership of the means of production. Perhaps this is a society of worker-run cooperatives. Or maybe the government, acting as a representative of the people, controls the means of production. The important thing to notice is that these are not societies without bosses. Your bosses might be government officials or you might have a collection of “co-bosses” at the co-op. These bosses, much like capitalist bosses, can worsen your well-being on a whim, compel your subjugation at work, or demand that you smile for your supper.

In short, the problem Robin identifies is a problem with human beings living together. His mistake is implicitly assuming that the bosses in socialism will be better. (As the case of Venezuela–among others–illustrates, living under a socialist regime does not guarantee liberation from bosses who dominate, subjugate, and compel submission.)

This mistake in arguments for socialism was spotted early on by Frank Knight, who said socialists tended to theorize as though socialist institutions would be run “by a special race of men, or by angels or Gods.” Milton Friedman objected to the tendency to “attribute all evils to the market and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men.” As David Friedman puts it, “An ideal socialist society is superior to a capitalist society. Socialism does better with perfect people than capitalism does with imperfect people [. . .]. And it is better to wear a bikini with the sun shining than a raincoat when it is raining. That is no argument against carrying an umbrella.” Mike Munger notes that when people think about the state, they think of it as a magical unicorn “that has the properties, motivations, knowledge, and abilities that they can imagine for it” rather than an institution run by the “politicians I actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist.” And you should definitely check out the books that Jason and I have written on the topic.

Maybe socialist societies with angels for bosses would be better than capitalist societies with humans for bosses. But that’s hardly a fair comparison. A more productive defense of socialism would, to paraphrase Rousseau, take people as they are and institutions as they might be.