I’ve been dabbling with the idea of communism for quite some time now, but one thing has always prevented me from being fully convinced. How do you allocate the inherently scarce resources. I strongly believe that a local person/company knows better how to allocate resources efficiently than a central government 100s km away. For example food. A central government will never be able to know the area as well as locals. How do you solve this?
Nobody has given a good answer yet (including me, mine was lazy), so let's get into this.
What is "efficiency"? This is often left undefined in discussions (not always). Can we say resources are allocated efficiently or inefficiently without defining what we mean and how to measure it?
Let's clear up the misconception that communism is always very pro-centralisation. A state will have to design its economy intelligently, which includes an appropriate use of decentralisation. To take your example of local government having budgetary discretion; it's not part of communist ideology to smack that down and say "No! Every decision is made in the capital!"