If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM'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).
No, the problem was that without a market to provide prices, it was impossible to sensibly allocate resources (capital, labour).
It was possibly exacerbated by military competition with the USA, but it was inevitable for sound economic reasons.
Communism is a bad idea in theory as well as in practise.
If you have unlimited renewable energy, self-driving electric vehicles, IBM'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).
Leaving aside the aforementioned calculation problem, no, you still have to take from people. Watson, electric vehicles, etc. don't (yet!) build and run themselves autonomously.
It'd be nice to think that you'd have to take less, as time goes on. But that's not proved true either; expenditure on socialist programs has increased over time, even as technology works to decrease the actual cost of providing goods and services.
Again, that's to be expected. If you give people the ability to vote themselves other peoples money, by and large, they'll do it.
Communism would pay janitors more money than it paid scientists and engineers, simply because that janitor was a member of the Communist party. Many scientists and engineers defected from Russia to other countries to earn more money. Russia had some great products AK-47, Soyuz rocket and capsule, and sold the MIG to many nations as well.
Look at Greece right now, they had major socialist programs and they got into deep debt. The USSR got into deep debt as well with their socialist programs, and their military was expensive to maintain. Nations that owed them money like Afghanistan they invaded and the USA countered by training Osama bin Laden and the Taliban to fight then guerrilla style, on 9/11/2001 we wish we hadn't trained them.
The USA didn't outspend the USSR it out innovated it with science and technology. Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Sun, etc all developed better hardware and software and the PC Industry with MS-DOS had programs that automated tasks and saved money. It wasn't Reaganomics that boosted the economy it was the tech industry that did so. US companies sold the technology to other nations and money started to flow into the US economy. This was back when technology was made in the USA, now it is made in China mostly.
And, speaking more generally, the U.S. Department of Defense is the world's largest employer, 3.2 million strong. When taking into account benefits, pensions, etc., it may also be called the largest socialist program.
That statistic paints a big picture; it's not that having a market economy was sufficient to become the sole superpower of the 1990's. It was that the U.S. had a lot of centralized spending in "the right places at the right times" and then allowed the marketplace to pick up the results and run with them wherever convenient. However, it's very difficult to backpedal and reallocate now that this has been done, and the status quo probably won't change until a crisis motivates it.
The pattern of every emerging market - Japan, Korea, China - is that state power still entangles itself somehow, even if there is a marketplace at the low level. We have never had a "purely ideological" state anywhere.
The great entrepreneurs who built Sillicon Valley-- Shockley, Ellison, Jobs, and the rest-- were people who were driven to find funding wherever they could get it. If the government had said no, they would have gone (and often did go) to someone else. Similarly, the academics who are getting funding from DARPA or the DOD now would gladly accept funding from private sources as well. The money is just as green.
The military certainly jump-started many technologies by putting money into the hands of engineers and scientists-- in some cases, possibly even by years or decades. But those technologies would have been invented anyway, just on a slower timescale.
It wasn't inventing the technologies that gave the West an edge-- it was commercializing them. And for that you need businessmen, not bureaucrats. If the USSR could have produced a competitive semiconductor industry, the 1980s and 1990s would have looked much different. Instead, they couldn't even keep loaves of bread on the shelves.
Canada, Switzerland, Neatherlands, Norway seem to be successfully managed countries with large social service programs.
The USSR had a high cost in the military and suffered from economic stagnation. Unable to grow enough wheat they had to buy from the USA to feed their people.
Greece didn't raise taxes enough to cover their debts from social programs. As their economy grew worse the cost of health insurance rose and costed more.
A lot of European nations can afford socialist programs because they don't spend a lot on their military due to the USA protecting the European coasts after WW2.
Canada also does not spend a lot on their military due to a partnership with the USA to protect their coasts as well. So they have more money for socialist programs.
