Isn’t the issue less to do with “communism” than with concentrating too much power in too few hands? It seems to me all political systems tend toward autocracy and the only thing preventing that eventuality are robust systems in place that disperse power.

Yeah but communism as a doctrine will inevitably lead to exactly that, concentrating too much power into too few hands. Because if you want to look for the "collective interest" of the people, then people will disagree. Musk can do rockets not because he convinced everyone that it's in our collective interest (though he may believe so) - he can do them because he doesn't have to justify the collective interest. As soon as the collective interest is a matter of doctrine, some group of people will be in charge of it, and they will by necessity suppress other opinions about what "collective interest" might be.

In 1919 no one in the world would have thought the backward, fledgling Soviet Union would be the first in space. Your example is not apt.

But it is - they could because the party leadership wanted to/ decided it was important. My point isn't that communism can't achieve anything, it's that you can't have private initiative that's against the party line - and that's not an accident of one particular implementation, that is a "feature" of communism itself.

"Unanimous" agreement on the collective good/collective interests only works, at all, in small groups (primitive societies) and dictatorships. That was really my point.

A person (or persons) with sufficient power/influence decided to pursue space flight and it happened. Which example does the previous sentence refer to?

When Musk decided to pursue space (or EV for that matter) he had very little power. Wasn't even a billionaire yet. There are thousands of people with similar fortunes that you never hear about.

So you don’t know which situation I was referring to? The fact the Musk accomplished what he did with SpaceX is prima facie proof that he had sufficient power/influence to accomplish the goal.

Which is exactly what I'm talking about. Communism = "for sufficient power to influence/accomplish a goal, you must be in the party elite (tens, at most hundreds of persons)". Liberal democracy: "for sufficient power to influence/accomplish a goal, you must start at least reasonably well off" (3 to 4 orders of magnitude more people)

"power" is distributed in democracies; The centralized nature of communism is its weakest spot, and it is by design.

Another person with sufficient power/influence decided that computing is evil and USSR fell behind in (micro)computers and chips terribly.

Also, a lot of USSR space advancements were made thanks thanks to captured Nazi scientists. If they had to rely purely on homegrown science, they'd have had much harder time.

Look up Wernher Von Braun. A group of people thought Jim Crow was a great idea. A group of BP executives thought it was a great idea to not fix oil leaks in Nigeria and poison a bunch of people. I think you miss the point. People with power in any system can use that power for bad. It’s not the economic system that causes this it’s shitty humans that do.

Thing is, in democratic market economy system there're various checks & balances. Sooner or later (usually, sooner) we learn about all of those issues. If somebody just bids on a wrong evolutionary path... Well, there're many investors bidding on all possible paths. Some win, some loose.

In soviet central planning system, few people make decisions that affect many and there's was redundancy. No free press. No political opposition. No economic rivalries to challenge. Same in civic/industrial evolution. If a committee decides to pursue idea X and drop idea Y.... So be it.

There was no democratic feedback mechanism either. Public is not happy that state money is used to prop up revolutions all around the world while one's citizen are living in poor condition? Tough luck, party line is never wrong.

I think different systems work best at different levels of scale. Power needs to be accountable and visible to the people affected by it. The more local it is, the more you can safely do.

NN Taleb stated it well on Twitter, I think: "At Fed level, libertarian; state, Republican; local, Democrat; family/friends, socialist."