Since the communism fell around 1990, we typically today think it's a bad system, and that if it hadn't been bad it wouldn't have failed. We also think that adopting communism was a historical mistake for many countries.

But is this really true?

Or perhaps, for certain countries, in certain historical circumstances, communism was simply the best thing they could possibly do to quickly achieve some level of prosperity and development, to lift countless people out of poverty, and to modernize. I mean, if you look at the Eastern Europe before communism... it was extremely backwards. It was very poor. Russia was extremely poor and backwards before the communism. So perhaps communism has actually accomplished its role in history by allowing all those countries to become modern.

Then at some point historical circumstances changed, this way of central planning wasn't needed anymore and it became counterproductive, so communism itself ultimately fell. But its ultimate demise, perhaps, is not to say that it failed in reaching its original goals of quickly modernizing countries that were really backwards in comparison to the West.

Today we often say South Korea and North Korea show why capitalism is so much better? But is it really capitalism that helped South Korea become rich, or it was American help?

There are so many capitalist countries in Africa and Asia today, why don't they become as prosperous as South Korea?