This is not really correct. There is no inherent reason to remove choice in what you buy or where you work. Individuals in the Soviet Union once they had access to an urban habitation and once they were done with their first job after university were actually allowed to change jobs as they wished. If you had no university education, then you could change jobs as often as you wanted. And then you could buy what you wanted with your money. If it didn't exist then yes, invention was complicated and bureaucratic.

Beyond that, the argument of starvation is flawed, because Russia in the market system had worse famine than the USSR, and crucially, the USSR ended famine in the Russian Empire, not started it. You can argue there were unnecessary famines, and you'd be right, but saying that famine is an inevitable component of the Soviet system is wrong because there were one/two, at the beginning, and then none after.

The actual limit to Central Control assuming that the people doing the central control are willing to let consumer goods follow what people want is data and the ability to process it. In the USSR this was very low - data collection was manual and plans were updated every 5 years. The bureaucracy opposed every attempt to improve the situation as that would usurp their power. Beyond that the freedom that individuals can have as far as what to buy and which jobs to build is only limited by what others are willing to work for.

It's also not true that they attempted to control more aspects of someone's life as ever before. Feudal states had much more control than the Soviet state on their inhabitants. Some capitalist states had more control.

There are arguments to be made here. A poor rehash of a poor book written by an author who openly admitted that he started with conclusions and worked backwards from there is not one.

The reality is much more complex than market=good everything else=bad. Heck, even the Soviet weren't always opposed to markets. Their ideology didn't even explicitly oppose markets, only class distinction in production.

Wasn't the rise of fascism in Germany directly caused by crippling and humiliating terms levied at Versailles

But hardly an excuse to try to exterminate an entire groups of people and invade other countries. Don't think anyone argues Hitler national socialism would have been fine if it wasn't for the allies. But they do argue communism might have worked of it wasnt for the USA.

> Don't think anyone argues Hitler national socialism would have been fine if it wasn't for the allies.

I’d be surprised if there aren't neo-Nazis that argue exactly that, just as modern Leninists argue that Soviet Communism might have worked out great for everyone if it wasn't for the USA.

> Wasn't the rise of fascism in Germany directly caused by crippling and humiliating terms levied at Versailles

No. That, along with the rise of Communism in Russia, the rise of Italian fascism, and...was among the indirect causes.