The problem is that most new governments are established with violence. You can't say, "oh, they just didn't do it right," when they couldn't have done it any other way when they are trying to piece together a government in the middle of a civil war. Forget communism, it doesn't work, and its value is only educational.
But that doesn't mean we don't have the ability to implement a new system which takes advantage of our newfound ability to process data as never before. We are close to abolishing physical currency and replacing it with electronic currency anyway. Why not just make it official? And once that happens, why not use the data from the transactions for economic planning? You say we can't have sufficient information? Really? When every transaction of every product is logged, as it ALMOST is now? If Netflix can predict what I would like to watch based on how much I like what I already have watched, why couldn't a computer predict my needs based my past purchases?
I'm just saying that our situation has fundamentally changed, and its possible that the lessons we have learned from history may not necessarily still apply. It bothers me to no end that people don't seem to be very interested in using technology to improve government. We use it for everything else.
We have supercomputers and vast real-time data collected by satellites and ground stations, and we still can't predict the weather to an arbitrary degree of accuracy over short timescales. The reason for this is that complex dynamic systems, like weather and economics, are chaotic - model outputs can diverge wildly from each other in very small numbers of cycles due to incredibly small variations in input.
Modelling based on a perfect and accurate record of all transactions cannot work for a useful amount of time before they break down due to unpredictable elements of the environment - indeed the weather is one such element. You can't use this week's umbrella sales as an indicator of sales for the same week next year; sales depend on non-economic factors.
It's known to be impossible to predict the weather more than about four days in advance with reasonable accuracy (and even that relies on a very woolly definition of 'reasonable'); it's impossible to predict the economy without an accurate weather forecast, and an accurate political forecast, and accurate forecasts of a whole bunch of other factors, any one of which, if slightly wrong, could lead your model to be total garbage.
Central planning of an economy is mathematically impossible. It doesn't matter how powerful your computer is; the only way to get accurate results is to look at the actual economy; and not only can you not see the future with that methodology; you are being over ambitious if you are trying to see the present. That's why governments produce quarterly statistics only many weeks or months after the end of the quarter to which they relate.
With totalitarian and universal data collection and hugely powerful computers, it might be possible to get a grip on what happened yesterday. It will never be possible to accurately and reliably predict what will happen tomorrow.
