Essentially central planning is not about the efficient allocation of economic resources, it is about control.
Central planning maximizes the extent of control that the state, and the people running the state, exercise. The desire to control others is a constant in history and is part and parcel of the construction of states. If the state can grab all the land and resources and control who and on what terms people get access to them, then this maximizes control, even if it sacrifices economic efficiency.
This sort of economic and political control — not Marxist ideology — is what central planning is all about. This is not to deny that Marxist ideology supported and legitimized central planning in several 20th-century societies. But it is to emphasize that the emergence and persistence of central planning is often a solution to the central economic and political problem of many elites: to control and extract resources from society.
Why Central Planning? from the Why Nations Fail blog.
And our current system of .gov doesn’t have to be socialist to still be all for central planning. Read The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation, if you haven’t already.
I think I’ve got another book to read.