The problem with russia was, that everything was centrally planned, and if that one "central planning location" failed, there was no bread. Even if you have two or three central "locations", one failing means 1/3 less supply and breadlines, since the others can't fill the gap so fast. In capitalism, there were many private companies (bakeries if we continue with the bread analogy), and if one of them fails, noone even notices, since there are so many alternatives.
So capitalism is great!
...until amazon buys all the bakeries (well bookstores), and then fscks up something.... Or if walmart outcompetes small stores and then burns down. Or if you have a duopoly on mobile phone markets. Or if a few investment groups buy all the housing..... oh wait...
To extend the argument, one of the original military motivations for the design of the internet was resilience of the network (relative to radio, IIRC, where relying on a central broadcaster would be prone to failure if the broadcaster was taken down). If one node goes down, even if it's bad news for that node's consumers, the network itself remains resilient.
If we shift that analogy back into the economic discussion, then instead of three places controlling bread production you break up large bakeries (or make running large bakeries untenable) and incentivize a plethora of small bakeries so that when some fail, others can organically fill the gaps. Both G.K. Chesterton and Tolkien were proponents of distributism back in their day, but it's not as well known today.
Yep... if amazon (aws) fails, half the internet is dead... if akamai fails, the other half is dead. There's also some microsoft somewhere, but who cares.
So yeah... the internet was a bunch of small bakeries... now it's pretty much centralized (though in two.. maybe three locations).
But the issue is why does Amazon get access to so much cheap debt that it can buy all those bookstores, competitors, iRobot, with loans for more than those other companies are really worth worth and then saddle them with that debt and shut them down?
Having seen underneath the surface of a certain FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) giant of USA/multinational market...
The two biggest differences they have with GosPlan is that they have way lower cardinality (less products/categories), and computing/communication power to iterate very fast.
Add to it market data (out of Walmart and others streaming all your purchases with minimal redaction and categorized by store/zip-code) plus in some cases direct inventory view into stores, and simply an army of people and robots/ai that do daily tuning of the supply chain, and you have GosPlan's wet dream of central planning.
Except central/distributed planning is orthogonal to capitalism itself.
Capitalism loves centralization and monopolies, it makes rent extraction easier.
But different forces kept competition going, with cartel busting added to the mix to stop capitalism from circling the wagons too much against competition.
So capitalism is great!
...until amazon buys all the bakeries (well bookstores), and then fscks up something.... Or if walmart outcompetes small stores and then burns down. Or if you have a duopoly on mobile phone markets. Or if a few investment groups buy all the housing..... oh wait...