I am sure Barack Obama saw plenty of smart and hard-working people in Indonesia, where he lived as a child. Why is Indonesia, a country very rich in natural resources, poor?
My husband, our friends and I worked hard in the USSR. Fresh from college, full of enthusiasm, we were in our prime years.
Soviet communists had created a system according to teachings by Karl Marx. This system was based on the principles of equality: Rich exploiters (private business owners) didn’t have a place in this “workers’ paradise.” Therefore, entrepreneurs were outlawed.
There were many talented inventors in the Soviet Union. To register their invention and obtain a patent, they had to include names of official communist leaders as co-creators, putting their names above their own. If government leaders could not comprehend the idea or its relevance to the future, the invention died.
The same applied to works of art. In this “just society,” people were whipped into conformity. Smart or not smart, all were equally poor.
Government central planners in the USSR, or China, or Cuba, didn’t invent modern technology, and Soviet-made computers of the late 1970s were imitations of IBM’s, created from stolen blueprints.