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There were so many contributing factors to those famines but my understanding is that it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping.

There has yet to be an attempt at a centrally planned economy that actually had accurate data to plan with.

Not advocating for central planning but the important point is that these failure modes are possible under any tyrannical regime. For an example of where capitalist competition fell down in a similar way, look no further than the Irish potato famines.

> it was far and away the broken incentives for reporting failures as successes to avoid immediate head chopping

Actually, no. What you're describing is more of a part of the next stage, designed to solve the already existing problem of famine, rather than its cause.

When communists come to power, they don't try in the first place to reorganize food production under strict centralization; this directly contradicts Marxism, according to which the state gradually withers away as a communist society is built. They simply try to redistribute what is already being produced in a more fair manner, to force peasants to contribute their "fair share" to society.

This causes production to plummet, people are dying of hunger, and only then the government takes control of organization of food production, and only after that do the factors you mentioned become relevant.

But the famine itself under communism, at least in its initial, most massive iteration, is not a consequence of a tyrannical regime, but is a consequence of the "taxation policy" being pursued.

Surely redistributing food (still effectively central planning) produced by a large number of peasant farmers is exactly equivalent to redistributive taxes on a very small number of very wealthy people who have captured the productivity gains of automation. Let's just dispense with the entire field of economics, all that fussy declining marginal utility and indifference curves, and just make a real zinger of an analogy.