Look into the "Knowledge Problem". It's all very strange, and the naive first blush is that you'd be right. Turns out not to be true. One version of the theory

Look into the "Knowledge Problem". It's all very strange, and the naive first blush is that you'd be right. Turns out not to be true. One version of the theory states that price information is just that - information - and you can't replace that with even excellent planning. You could call China a hybrid of a planned/free economy, but as it's moved more to something akin to free markets, wealth has gone up, especially for the poorest there. This may be as close to an experiment as we can get in economics. Chinese Communism was never quite Soviet style Communism, but the results begin to look suspiciously like data.