You completely missed my point. Who gets to decide what is unprofitable? Who decides which unprofitable things are worth doing? The set of all possible unprofitable activities is vastly larger than the set of profitable ones.
If it were profitable, government wouldn't need to do it.
You do realize we where talking about the USSR just a few seconds ago right? I guess Russia was a bad place to make cars so the government had to step in and do that.
Communism (and socialism in general) have inefficient (i.e. not wealth-maximizing) preferences for wealth distribution. So no, it doesn't surprise me that that massive government planning was required to try to implement the communist preference. If equal wealth distribution were wealth-maximizing, then the government wouldn't have needed to intervene to make it happen.
This isn't a groundbreaking point. It falls out straightforwardly from the economic definition of efficiency.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
(I plan to make these threads from now on. Downvote if you disapprove. If I miss one, feel free to do it yourself.)