Also, enormous monopolistic companies are centrally planned themselves. Companies like Walmart and Amazon have internal economies the size of some national economies, and their employees, teams, and departments aren’t buying and selling resources amongst themselves – the allocation of these resources is planned.

Attempting to run the internal operations of a large company like the free market was actually what killed Sears:

Lampert intended to use Sears as a grand free market experiment to show that the invisible hand would outperform the central planning typical of any firm.

He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other. Instead of cooperating, as in a normal firm, divisions such as apparel, tools, appliances, human resources, IT and branding were now in essence to operate as autonomous businesses, each with their own president, board of directors, chief marketing officer and statement of profit or loss. An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”

Anyone who’s worked at a large company could tell you that the plans they make aren’t flawless, but central planning at scale is not some scary untested idea, or a disproven relic of the past. It’s happening right now in large swaths of major industries.