Having spent a considerable length of time in some of those countries, some of it volunteering, I seriously doubt this is true in general.

It‘s typically a problem of productivity (producing low value goods), corruption, education, technology transfer, culture and so on.

It would be nice to have a simple unifying theory but I doubt it exists.

> I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

What he meant is that while communism works in a family because the incentives are aligned, it doesn't work at society level.