Competition is a feature, not a bug -- you're recalling a trope that has been a reactionary criticism to Adam Smith for centuries now, and was a core tenet of Marx's ideas -- that with a little central planning, there wouldn't be all of this effort wasted on competition. The original communists really believed that a planned economy would be more efficient once enacted. The fascists believed in the same basic inefficiency argument, but they thought that the government could control it while stil maintaining private property and traditional social structures. In comparison to those two, neoliberal economic theory has done pretty well for itself.