Except that doesn’t work.
Never works.
Even in private industry it doesn’t.
The problem with central planning is you never have all the data. You make decisions for company A without having a good idea of what they need to do.
The opposite of an authoritarian Chinese-style economy isn't the U.S. It's the chaotic disorder of a country like India.
I can tell you from my experience in working with government and industry that we are starting to see signs of a fundamental challenge in our way of life that can't be reconciled WITHOUT some central planning -- maybe even involving some form of authoritarian control.
The challenge is rooted in these two basic facts:
1. The man-made elements of the world in which we live are getting increasingly complex and expensive to produce.
2. Technology is changing our world so rapidly that these man-made elements of the world in which we live become functionally obsolete long before they physically break down.
This combination makes it damn near impossible to justify a major financial investment in any asset with a long life cycle. And this applies to government-owned assets like roads and bridges as well as privately-owned assets like office buildings and manufacturing facilities.
The end result is that there is likely to be a natural tendency for government and industry to lean on each other -- without any concern for "the market" -- to force things into place that make these long-term investments worthwhile.