There's a middle ground here. "Well-regulated market". Communists don't understand the market part (see Great Leap Forward) and Libertarians are idolators who think the market will automatically settle into the best thing for society if only we didn't have a government (see Somalia).
Amartya Sen has done a lot of research on this: the big factor that determines whether famines happen or not is less planning than it is democratic political structure.
But food shortages aren't the same as famines, and in the famines (assuming we're talking about the famines of the early 30s), economic incompetence wasn't the primary driving factor, although this may be simply a case where we simply have different definitions of incompetence. Stalin explicitly wanted millions of Ukrainians to die as collective punishment for not being sufficiently red, and it's fair to say that he thought it was better to have a dead peasant than a peasant not part of a collective farm, where they and all their activities could be made easily legible to the Soviet State and placed under bodily control.
Those millions of deaths racked up could have been avoided if Stalin had wanted to, even within the rubric of central planning. It's really not even a matter of the famine being something that could've been "averted": the famine wasn't a natural occurrence but something engineered.
Central planning, particularly central planning under a dictatorship, being highly conducive to psychopaths killing millions of people is something I'd agree with, but it needs explicit argumentation.
I don't disagree with your conclusion about political structure, but if we're talking about pure collective planning with no reliance on private allocation of capital, that's never actually been done with a democratic political structure anyplace larger than a kibbutz. Democratic socialism, IMO, is much closer to well-regulated capitalism than it is to communism.
State-allocated capital without a private finance sector has failed miserably
It is completely wrong. It is a lie. You weren't obviously talking about a spectrum, you were talking crap.
The spectrum comment referred to the socialism/communism terminology, with socialism generally seen as involving a heavily-regulated free market and large public sector, as opposed to communism where the private sector is outlawed. A spectrum.
I dunno; all the bright-line false alternative stuff doesn't work. Economic history is still interesting.
I believe it turns out that the regulation that got repealed probably would not have mattered much other than possibly setting up transparent exchanges for derivatives, and that seem speculative as well. YMMV, IMO, all that.
IM-uneducated-O their national decision makers currently do a better job than ours on economic policy (they actually invest in infrastructure and aren't in bankers' pockets on the plus side, a bit too cozy with leading industrial firms on the minus side), while local government there tends to be very corrupt by our standards.
You're aware that there's a healthy private sector in China currently, right? The name "Deng Xiaopeng" ringing any bells? They've had grains futures markets for 25 years now. Not state-allocated capital for food. Seems kinda implausible that you just missed that one.
I'd suggest reading a newspaper sometime. Maybe a history book or two.
I didn't claim that the existence of any state spending at all causes famine. That would be ridiculous to claim. Does US highway spending mean that we're undergoing a famine RIGHT NOW? I mean, the human race would be extinct if that claim held true, given that governments have generally existed most places.
What's your angle, here? What on earth are you trying to prove? To who?