When I was younger I heard that a planned economy can never be as potentially as efficient over time as a free (not capatilist) market due to the “lack of perfect information”. Meaning, not one authority can fully and effectively makimulsy optimize each supply/demand connection across all types of markets (pencils, food, trucks, medicine, tutors, etc…). The benefit of allowing markets to form organically (again, not monopolies, not regulatory capture, but person to person markets) is that each market will self-optimize for their own local maxima of efficiency.
This local optimization represents the implicit information that each market maker (buyer vs seller) brings to the table: effectively making every small market a mini-planned market. Now, many local maxima does not equal one true global maxima, but with many such algorithms local maxima produce very efficient and high quality results.
Hence, the challenge with a planned economy is not the control, but the lack of total information necessary to meet a higher efficiency target for all markets than would be possible if each market self-planned.
Don’t make me cry. Lmao