It's a good reminder that at this time, the purpose of planned economies and Communism specifically was to make everyone collectively richer. Everyone kind of assumed that competition was destructive and a bad thing. Marx wrote about it, progressives believed it (which is why Americans begrudgingly put up with trusts and monopolies for long periods), and you can see it here in Einstein's writing.

Only in hindsight looking at the failure of Communism do we frame it as "choice vs equality".

There's a good semi-fictionalized book about how this framing changed called "Red Plenty".