If people were really smart, particularly in the USA, What do you think they'd stop doing by now?
Giving money to Amazon, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Google .etc
It's like, you can't have an argument for price gouging, when you're enabling them by spending. If people were smart, they'd stop giving them money 10 - 15 years ago and they'd be right now, trying to reconstruct so they can be more economically friendly than how they are now.
They'd stop doing capitalism. Entirely. If people in the US were smart, they would have been the vanguard of the communist revolution in the late 1800s when Marxist ideas were starting to spread in the us.
That depends, people can be smart but malicious, non-coorperative, or selfish.
The prisoner's dilemma shows that there are systems where individually, the "smart" individual thing to do is globally non-optimal.
Even smartness and altruism alone isn't enough. Medical professionals are smart and out to help others, but any ER doc/nurse will tell you they have limited trust in their patients (rightly so in the real world).
Does "everyone is smart" also include both "altruism and cooperative trust in others"?
Marxism is critically flawed about surplus value and definitions of egalitarianism unfortunately so while it all sounds nice on paper it never worked in practice
It's important to consider, most of the communist states which fell were couped by or at war (cold or otherwise) with the USA. So it doesn't make sense to transplant the trend of communist states falling into a scenario where their single biggest threat is gone.
Does this just means countries that have historically been associated with the communist bloc, which is to say opposed to the US? Because I'd find it hard to make the argument that any communist or socialist country really exists today, even kind of. They're all operating under the same fundamental worker-owner principles.
I mean China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam. It's debatable whether they can be considered socialist, but they are usually given as examples of "failed" communism, so I felt it was important to note that's not really the case, at least judging from the data.