Back in the day people explained the USSR's superior economic performance (according to the public data at the time) as being due to the USSR not wasting resources on competition like capitalist countries did.

If you assume the planner knows the right thing to do is that's actually a perfectly valid argument. It's actually pretty heartening to see the people leading Google don't believe this about themselves, though, because people who think that usually aren't correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect