&gt; Today, Wal-Mart runs a centralized economy bigger than Soviet consumer production in the 1970s.<p>No, it doesn&#x27;t. It runs a business enterprise spread through a number of economies that is bigger than Soviet consumer production in the 1970s, which is perhaps a mildly interesting factoid but not particularly significant in assessing planned economies, since most of the markets in which it operates are not planned economies, and, in any case, even for any that are, WalMart isn&#x27;t doing the planning.