A woman was accused of saying things against the state and was sentenced to death. She lied to her daughter and told her daughter of her guilt, so that her daughter would not think bad thoughts against the state, the same state that was going to falsely execute her.
They used to bury people in mass graves, alive. Burying them alive was not out of cruelty, but convenience. They found that live bodies were easier to take from the carts into the graves than if they had to lift dead bodies.
The worst thing about capitalism is so much better than the worst thing about communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
Perhaps you could say that capitalism does a better job of dispersing the benefits but it’s worst aspects are quite bad. Overall, the thing to fear is concentrated power in too few hands and unregulated markets.
Also, lets pretend the hand chopper-offer is not an individual running a business, lets say he's in charge of an all-powerful communist government. When you centralize power too much, you risk a tyrant seizing control of that power.
Communism means the government seizes control of the means of productions. There are few businesses that I would rather see ran by the government than by a citizen with skin in the game.
Read the book Animal Farm if you haven’t already. That captures the psychology of communism perfectly and demonstrates why it never, ever works.
Orwell himself was a left anarchist and staunch antifascist and anticapitalist. His critique is that of authoritarianism. If you take away from Orwell that he supports capitalism in any form then you may have missed his point.
Everything goes to pot when the Stalin-analogue takes over, because the book is a reflection of Orwell's opinions of the Soviet Union and his experience fighting with the communes in Spain and the subsequent purges committed Stalinist factions against the Trotskyists. If you read the Ukranian prologue, which is included with most modern published editions, Orwell even outlines that Animal Farm is an attack on Stalinism, and he firmly believes in socialism.
"Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible."
"If it should become necessary for communist society to regulate the production of men, just as it will have already regulated the production of things, then it, and it alone, will be able to do this without difficulties. It seems to me that it should not be too difficult for such a society to achieve in a planned way what has already come about naturally, without planning, in France and Lower Austria. In any case it will be for those people to decide if, when and what they want to do about it, and what means to employ"
That's why, in the transition period, power would end up concentrated in the hands of a small group of people.
Obviously eventually the idea was that the State would cease to be anything more than a mechanism for distribution of resources and stop managing people, but there are an awful lot of problems with that, conceptually.
Also, the guy I responded to said it didn't have to involve central planning. It kinda does, at least Marx and Engel's version does.