<i>I thought the USA outspending the USSR, forcing resource exhaustion is what broke communism.</i><p>No, the problem was that without a market to provide prices, it was impossible to sensibly allocate resources (capital, labour).<p>It was possibly exacerbated by military competition with the USA, but it was inevitable for sound economic reasons.<p>Communism is a bad idea in theory as well as in practise.<p><i>If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM&#x27;s watson providing clinical expertise instead of doctors, etc, you could provide socialism without taking from people (because labor no longer has value compared to software and automation).</i><p>Leaving aside the aforementioned calculation problem, no, you still have to take from people.  Watson, electric vehicles, etc. don&#x27;t (yet!) build and run themselves autonomously.<p>It&#x27;d be nice to think that you&#x27;d have to take less, as time goes on.  But that&#x27;s not proved true either; expenditure on socialist programs has <i>increased</i> over time, even as technology works to decrease the actual cost of providing goods and services.<p>Again, that&#x27;s to be expected.  If you give people the ability to vote themselves other peoples money, by and large, they&#x27;ll do it.