That line is blatant projection on the part of central planners. Both in the sense of how they see the world and it must be planned rather than arising from interactions of independent parties and random vatiables and because it is casting their own flaws onto others.
I'm curious to know why you see it that way, as I don't interpret it like that at all.
Quite the opposite in fact: if anything it's a reaction to people who do try to understand a system by looking at its original plan: it says that you should disregard that and look at what the system actually does (which includes "interactions of independent parties and random variables", as you say).
In any case, that's how I meant it: it's a bit useless to dig up the original purpose of corporations in history books to talk about how corporations work today, like the comment I replied to suggested.
