Investments and savings aren't the same thing. Each serves a purpose. Investments sometimes work out ... but often don't. The function of savings is / should be to provide a store of value and to allow for accumulation of assets that can be invested.

Try buying or building a small business beyond the level of the micro loan approaches [used in some third world countries -- often successfully] without some personal savings. Then complicate that situation with a world where loans are not available either because there is no allocation process or because no one is willing to loan with no incentive, but with the certainty of at least some defaults.

I personally have a business that I financed through savings. It hasn't made me rich, but it might. What I can attest to is that without savings I would have lost the business by now as almost nothing in business goes perfectly. Think $10 oil when you were planning on $20 oil. Think lightning strikes, casing collapses, sudden water break throughs, rivers changing courses. Try to survive a few bad years with nothing in reserve, and where partial liquidation of the investment would result in pennies on the dollar.

You are correct about traditional defined benefit pension plans being investors not savers. The trusts are investors. The sponsors have mostly investor attributes. The plan participants see pensions as savings ... but they aren't. The plan participants, the plan sponsor, and the PBGC are at all at risk for the results of the trust returns.

The move toward defined contribution plans makes the new plan participants solely at risk. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. By and large, the political left is more likely to be outraged by turning pension plan participants into non professional, part time, minority investors. I have no real opinion one way or the other about the societal good of this ongoing change, but do not believe that the corporations are doing this to benefit the plan participants.

You are correct about central planning. There is a lot of central planning in the U.S.A. Most of it IMO doesn't work too well. Central planning tends to work best on an ad hoc basis where there is a monumental goal and because of the disasterous consequences of failur, the other consequences [collateral damage from the ad hoc activities] can largely be ignored for what the powers that be regard as the greater good. Central planning can range from these sorts of efforts [e.g. winning World War II or maybe at some point mitigating peak oil]; to the the more mundane and contiunous picking of winners and losers through tax policy and grants; setting of interest rates through the actions of the "independent" Federal Reserve; to the true command economies like the old Soviet model.