US wartime production ran on Soviet-style central planning under private ownership

Evidence

For immediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the US into the Second World War, the US government began to emulate … the Soviet one. It told factory owners how much to produce and to what specifications, from aircraft carriers to processed food. It even employed a price czar – the economist John Kenneth Galbraith – whose job, literally, was to decide the price of everything, to fend off inflation, and to ensure a smooth economic transition from wartime to peacetime. It is no exaggeration to say that American capitalism was run according to Soviet planning principles, with the important exception that the networked factories remained under the private ownership of Big Business. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates whether wartime mobilization proves state capacity for ‘actually existing socialism’ and Pollock’s state-capitalism thesis. — connects to: America quietly enacted central planning ideals while denouncing the Soviet Union’s — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 158; US wartime capitalism was run on Soviet-style central planning; American capitalism secretly adopted Soviet centralized planning principles in the 1960s. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 158 (+6 more)
• SEED: Potential angle: the price-czar Galbraith episode as a forgotten peak of American planning precedent with Soviet inspiration.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the macroeconomic-intervention side of economic history; tangential but relevant to platform-era state-capacity arguments.

Broader Connections

• US wartime capitalism was run on Soviet-style central planning #corroborates (1.00)
• American capitalism secretly adopted Soviet centralized planning principles in the 1960s. #expands (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 158
• Wartime state control proved economies are politically moldable #expands (0.85) — Gary Mongiovi, Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy…, 29
• The war replaced heroic entrepreneurs with a private-public technostructure #corroborates (0.85) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 146
• Wartime state intervention forced private property to bow to national-interest priorities #qualifies (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 149
• State wartime intervention exposed the natural order of capitalism as a political choice #complicates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 169
• The Soviet Union studied applying American Taylorism under socialist production relations. #responds-to (0.75)
• World War I proved production relations could be deliberately changed #exemplifies (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174