Regardless whether we end up agreeing or disagreeing more, I'm very much enjoying the discussion. Debates like this are why I pay the $5 / month for Medium membership. Even with a huge number of bad-faith actors, there is also a huge number of people who just want to pick each other's brains as we are doing. :-)

IMO: Communism per se is great in both theory and practice, but suffers from the same problem as capitalism, in that the bigger the country, the more they will tend towards corruption and authoritarianism.

IMO in bigger countries, capitalism leads more quickly to corruption, and communism to authoritarianism, due the basic structures.

As countries get larger, ever larger bureaucracies are required. This creates necessary "permanent states" (aka "deep states"). The larger these deep states grow, the easier corruption and authoritarianism grows, as oversight becomes more difficult.

The Morman enclave and Nepal can work as communist countries, because the number of groups being organized under central planning was/ is managable on a human scale.

I fully agree that a central planned economy for a large modern country (even a mid-sized one) is not possible. Again we can see that Nepal is small, and not that modern.

In mid-larger sized countries, I am fully in the social democracy camp. Meaning there is a mix of socialism and capitalism, but leaning much more towards the socialist side for a VERY simple reason. Economies of scale.

I think few people would argue that Amazon works more efficiently (with economies of scale) as it has grown. The same applies to state organizations. We can see this in US Social Security, which has managed the 3x growth in US population and is still working fine (financing SS is not the same as administering SS).

I live now in a small country (Austria) that has had a relatively stable population for many decades. I also have had much insight in social security here for reasons I won't go into. Social security works fine here since the country was reorganized after WWII.

I work a lot in small to medium sized countries, and the smaller size of the governments seem to my mind to be easier to oversee. My company is small, on purpose. I work with small to massive (i.e. 150k employees) companies. The bigger the company, the more corruption, and to a lesser degree, authoritarianism.

I know my examples are anecdotal, but I stand by them.

IMO it is the size of the countries first and foremost that is the problem. In general I think socialism, particularly social democracy, is superior to communism or more capitalist leaning gov'ts.