>The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions.
Yeah, but a planned economy wasn't the reason. The reasons were:
(a) they wanted to establish their elite rule (and that required a big show of force and getting rid of potential enemies)
(b) ideology was at play (ethnic tensions, coming up with a BS "elite class" to get rid of in the form of kulacs, etc)
(c) they started from very poor rural economies very fragile to weather, famines, and such
(d) they improvised their decisions with much incomplete data from ad-hoc established regional bureaucracies.
Those are not problems with a "planned economy", but more of those particular historical circumstances.
Neither (a), (b), or (c), or (d) are the case anymore (I mean, they still need to enforce their party rule, but not establish it from nothing).
In fact China's growth in GDP the last 50+ years has been phenomenal, so it's not like "they made very, very poor decisions" for their economy over this span.
Besides, today China's economy is not at all planned the same hard way Stalin's Russia or Mao's economy was.
Yeah, but a planned economy wasn't the reason. The reasons were:
(a) they wanted to establish their elite rule (and that required a big show of force and getting rid of potential enemies)
(b) ideology was at play (ethnic tensions, coming up with a BS "elite class" to get rid of in the form of kulacs, etc)
(c) they started from very poor rural economies very fragile to weather, famines, and such
(d) they improvised their decisions with much incomplete data from ad-hoc established regional bureaucracies.
Those are not problems with a "planned economy", but more of those particular historical circumstances.
Neither (a), (b), or (c), or (d) are the case anymore (I mean, they still need to enforce their party rule, but not establish it from nothing).
In fact China's growth in GDP the last 50+ years has been phenomenal, so it's not like "they made very, very poor decisions" for their economy over this span.
Besides, today China's economy is not at all planned the same hard way Stalin's Russia or Mao's economy was.