[padobson]

I don't know where the dividing line is between "regulated markets" and "central planning", but I think you raise the need for some distinctions.

The space program is a great example. Could the US have beaten the USSR to the moon without private suppliers like IBM? IBM couldn't exist in a centrally planned economy, and the Apollo missions wouldn't have been successful without private suppliers like IBM.

Apollo, Manhattan, WWII and South Korea via the Korean War and post-war American influence are all great examples of successful government programs, but I don't know that any of them would have happened without US markets providing funding and infrastructure. Ford was building a Sherman tank every 90 minutes during WWII.

There's probably a tipping point where large programs like these extract so much value from the markets that fund them that those markets cease to function, which is probably why wars are often funded with debt instead of direct taxation.

[Iv]

Yes, it is less about "central planification" than "total planification". The former can and did work in many instances, the latter never succeeded or at least never out-performed free markets (still I would have loved to see how Cuba would have fared without the embargo)

Intelligence is scarce, honesty too and information is often only partial. Some decisions are better done at a local scale.

I believe that NASA would have designed computers even without IBM. Possibly even faster but it would have been a tailored computer that would have been very expensive and of little civilian application.

We see it now with SpaceX: NASA sucked at cutting costs. But it excelled at skipping steps and it put a man on the moon in 1969, a goal that vastly outpaced the private space industry, that did not even exist at the time. The whole space industry was quickstarted by this centrally planned effort.

My personal opinion is that the red line that a state should not cross lest it has a complete information and huge stash of intelligence to process it, is price setting. It can have, for many things, a target and try to enforce it (in the case of oil, through some sales quota for instance) but it should use failure to achieve these targets as an indication that it misses some information about the economy or that its incentives are insufficient.

[padobson]

I believe that NASA would have designed computers even without IBM. Possibly even faster but it would have been a tailored computer that would have been very expensive and of little civilian application.

You don't have to guess at this - just look at the Soviet space program.