Nielsen’s view of pure socialism, particularly in regard to the values of autonomy, equality and justice, is not a convincing argument in favor of freedom. The reason the argument is unconvincing is because it presumes that a purely socialist community, in which all members have an equal say on the distribution of work, or how community resources would be handled, would come from an informed opinion. It also presumes that such a community would only be possible if intrinsically human elements, such as greed, envy or even desire did not exist. Thus, Nielsen’s theory is not plausible in any realistic sense.

In consideration of the first example, in which all members of a community have an equal vote, there is the fact that not all votes would be equally informed. For example, Nielsen’s model suggests a classroom where there is no intrinsic hierarchy between student and teacher, and therefore all students get to vote on what they should learn during the class. If this was a literature class, what are the chances that the entire class might prefer comic books to established texts with actual literary value? If students had the option, might they also not vote out the literature requirement entirely? This is what would happen in Nielsen’s view of pure socialism. The same could be said for workers in an organization; collectively, they might choose an option that ends up making a worse product because not all opinions are equally informed.

The second reason why the argument is unconvincing is because humans have psychological impulses and desires that inherently lead to conflict and competition. Even if money is removed, there are many reasons why one person might dislike another; there would inevitably be disorder in any given society, so the idea that creating a purely socialist system would result in more freedom remains unrealistic.