Even if angelic creatures (or actual angels) were in charge of a genuine socialist country, they would surely fail because it is a species of utopianism, though Karl Marx with his communism claimed he only believed in so-called scientific socialism/communism; but, he was, in point of fact, still a utopian because such a perfect system of assumed perfection cannot operate among imperfect (read: sinful) human beings.  

Good and needed reading would include the worthy classic by John Passmore entitled: The Perfectibility of Man.   So, imperfect men and women, armed with ideological fixations, therefore, create no real heavens but fairly real hells on earth, e.g., the Soviet Gulag, etc.

But, just keeping matters for discussion on the economic level, two terms can here readily suffice to adequately explain why no actual socialist economic system or social market economy can ever truly function actually as such: “scarcity” and “price mechanism.“   Among other socialists, Marx erroneously concluded that capitalism had supposedly forever solved the perennial problem of scarcity, meaning the ability to permanently supply all human wants on an endlessly expanding scale.   This was an “illusion” that, among many, came to notably dominate his fetid brain.  

Supply and demand, especially in terms of trying to make sure a true, free-market economy exists, yields the likelihood and, more or less, the capability that people can be reasonably supplied those goods and services that they demand – but, not without continuous efforts at making rational economic decisions, literally, billions of them every day that no gigantic army of even well-meaning socialist bureaucrats could entirely manage, much less fully comprehend.    Economics, in short, is practically a synonym for scarcity.

But, it is an always logical and manifest impossibility to ever actually eliminate the reality of scarcity since all markets, in such a purely theoretical world, would become perfectly satiated all of the time; this is not in logical accord with the thinking of economics because it deals with the ways and means of handling the permanent reality of scarcity; moreover, the elimination of scarcity would, by definition, mean the complete elimination of any need for considering supply or demand because no market(s) would ever be needed in the realm of Utopia.  

 In short, people may have an infinitude of wants, but there has never been any means of genuinely supplying an infinitude of goods and services due to the existence of limits needing, in turn, economic calculations for, e.g., acquiring needed resources, etc. 

Economics deals with overcoming limits, meaning the always existing situation fully descriptive of the existence of scarcity, not limitless abundance of anything or everything imaginable to be made available any time or any place.  Free-market economics may have many capacities in terms of market functions and operations; yet, it cannot banish real-world limitations, for it has not the ability to create Utopia; scarcity will, therefore, necessarily forever exist to justify, logically, the very existence of economics itself, which is what ideologists, being, by definition, utopians, really cannot substantively comprehend.  

The second economically irreplaceable and irreducible factor concerns the “price mechanism” that, e.g., the socialist Oskar Lange had, long ago, said certainly merited Ludwig von Mises, an exemplar of the Austrian School of Economics (ASE),  a grand statue to be prominently erected someday in Warsaw, Poland.   (One wonders, of course, if such a Mises monument had ever been or, moreover, will ever be placed anywhere in that city.)  

It was found to be definitively impossible to properly conduct any economic system whatsoever without taking into consideration the functional and logical necessity of establishing values through pricing, through the reality of the price mechanism, as a most requisite and unavoidable means of rational economic calculation for any market situations whatsoever; valuations through prices are a logical necessity for markets; and, among other important implications, socialist wage and/or price controls mandated through government bureaucracies cannot eliminate the law of supply and demand.  

Wages, for instance, are the prices accorded to labor; land, capital, and labor as the three classic ingredients are now to be suitably added to knowledge or information as all being rationally subject calculations revolving around price considerations.   Since the price mechanism, a function of free-market economics or, for that matter, any real-world kind of economics, cannot be rationally abolished as to its much needed existence, socialism as an economic system can never, therefore, be substantively actualized in any country on earth.  Whenever given a free choice, moreover, most people normally flee from the so-called Workers Paradise; they vote with their feet.  

Mises had demonstrated this superbly, in his many discussions of socialism in many books and articles, as to its inherent and integral inoperability as a genuine economic system; and, his insightful and fruitful considerations have, moreover, been carried forward by other ASE economists who have, increasingly, verified the logical conclusions through both empirical studies and theoretical demonstrations concerning the basics of economic reality, inclusive of the necessary function of the price mechanism.  

But, ideologists, especially those on the Left, never learn from history.  If Obama gets elected and with a Democrat-controlled US Congress, the era of the 1970s, economically speaking, will essentially return with increased taxes on income, savings, and investment that also, in turn, provoked higher and higher interest rates and higher and higher inflation rates for America; welcome to bad times nostalgia: “Obamanomics” as it is being interestingly called.

In conclusion, as neither the permanent economic problems of scarcity nor the price mechanism can be ever (ideologically) abolished, socialism cannot succeed, under any conceivable present or future circumstances, due to the aforementioned utopianism that it forever represents and supports ideologically as mere economic fiction of the worst sort, according to the ASE.   The failure of a socialist America to achieve genuine success is (economically) guaranteed.

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