This is the first thing you learn as a Political Science student in university. The "science" half of the name is somewhat lacking when you can't experiment.
> We now know that Marxist type systems of the sorts deployed by Lenin and Mao don't actually result in a better world and in many cases result in a worse one
We don't know this. There's a lot more to economic security and human rights than private vs state control of production.
> We once had this in the American West, but no more, so we should hurry up and build more rockets.
While a frontier can provide some space for experimentation, redundancy is the real cure.
We haven't done this as a society though since there is an advantage to large scale when securing a nation's economy and currency with armed force.
The interesting new technology doesn't seem to be cheaper rockets but instead a new way to make sure our money is valued as we wish. Cryptocurrency's method of securing transactions against counterfeiters using math enables small-scale economies to operate without wasting too much resource on keeping order.
A system where cities/towns have more sovereignty would enable greater diversity and experimentation because a failure would be much easier to deal with.
Thousands of cities with each their own policies of how wealth spreads is the diverse dream I wish for as the world shrinks into fewer languages, customs, and ideas.
