Communism is a failed approach to economic management by government because there are no incentives for a person to improve the system.

Everybody was dropping out and living in communes. It might have been the culmination of the 50s when everyone had jobs and opportunity because the US was the powerhouse of innovation.

Everything is corrupt because everything is corrupt. I'm pretty sure it always was and always will be. What's different is the refusal to acknowledge it and work to control it. Thanks to the depression and FDR, we knew it as a nation and put laws in place. Thanks to time, memory failure, and Ronald Reagan, we reopened the box .

Is it because in the mid-1980s the communist party under Deng Xiaoping started encouraging suitably inclined young people to go into business for themselves? Or is this a total myth?

that is, access, via private ownership, to wealth. There is no inherent upper limit to the amount of money/wealth a private individual can amass. But wealth does have to be secured by laws that guarantee private ownership (or simply seized by a dictator--but "we" weren't supposed to be living in a dictatorship!) That legal-thingy was the rub. The Soviet Union had money--the ruble--but had, at least as a foundational gesture, abolished private ownership. That was what was anathema to the western world, the abolition of private property as a founding principle of the state itself.

Capitalist propaganda had already acknowledged, in the sixties, that in a capitalist society money/property was the only acceptable motivation for anyone to do anything. Driving that message home here "at home" was the reason for decrying the communist world for its supposed "lack of initiative." In fact, "initiative" was lacking everywhere throughout the world because material wealth was all that could be achieved, there was in reality no good life on offer. Doctors, teachers, mothers, fathers--they all did what they did with their lives, so it was told, because of money.

My suspicion is that today, in a totally capitalized globe, there is still plenty of "lack of initiative" because, to put it simply, people just don't want to do what's on offer and are asking themselves whether any amount of monetary reward for their labor makes a lifetime devoted to what boils down to the pursuit of money worth living.

I think that a lot of our problem today can be traced back to corruption--corruption of power, corruption of material wealth--among the elites of the communist states. The allure of (western) materialism can turn a lot of heads and continues to do so. So for half a century the western capitalist world poured money in to West Berlin to put the glamor and glitz of money/property on constant display to surrounding people living under communism. They had to be made to feel how deprived they were, how much cooler life was in the west. And, eventually, they more or less bought it.

Communism in "half" the world was the only reason that any conditions improved at all in the western other half of the world.

"On the Media" is a show from NPR. My jaw almost dropped when I heard the first of their promised 5-part series on poverty in the US, "The Poverty Tour." It shows us, among other things, just how thoroughly we as a nation have been propagandized over the past several decades to accept the inherent goodness of private wealth even as we ourselves become poorer and more alienated.

Here's a link.

And for a critical--and IMO very important--assessment of what's happening in China today in terms of its mushrooming capitalization, I recommend any of Jia Zhangke's films, especially "Touch of Sin" from 2013.

The third way is coming, Bluesee. It's just slow--like glaciers, like history. - : )