You forgot to mention the rampant corruption, cronyism and lack of rule of law. Those things will kill any society no matter what the system. As best I can tell communism is basically socialism with all of the above - a powerful authoritarian elite calling all the shots, living it up while the proles suffer through their incompetence.

In the US we have all the above with a failed state that fails to recognize it as corruption. Instead of actually trying to dictate how the economy runs they just let their fake version of "free market" (anything but) capitalism do the dirty work and inject their bankers as rent-seekers, creaming off anything in excess of what is necessary to stop the population revolting.

Which is kind of smart - saves them all the effort of actually pretending to to run the country, while a few hundred mostly old white guys provide smoke and mirrors alternately pointing blame at each other and all the while the money keeps on rolling in from the government bailouts, quantitive easing, the Federal Reserve other government enforced handouts for free.

Yeah, we may laugh at how badly Venezuela is screwing it up, but only because their elite didn't listen to GWB's PNAC folks and manage to capitalize on all that oil and opportunity as effectively and sustainably as the US elite did.