The problem with communism is that it has a very lofty ideal of people coming together, working together and becoming self-sufficient to the point where they need no government. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? And it's so simple, too! So what's wrong? There is one catch: you must embrace a high level of self-sacrifice virtually all of the time to make such a society possible. That's where you run into a particular snafu: the level of self-sacrifice required will clash against the inherent selfishness of human nature. Nobody can be self-sacrificing of the type required for such a society, but this is what's essentially required to allow true communism to develop and prosper as Karl Marx intended. And, just in case people are thinking of selfishness as a bad thing, it's not so long as you don't allow your selfishness to go out of control; your selfishness is a way for you to recognize and achieve that which you need and desire in your life so long as what you do doesn't interfere with the liberty of others and you're willing to earn what you want as well as to assume the responsibility and consequences for your choices and actions. Because of the inherent selfishness of human nature, people will deviate from communist self sacrifice, which means the society either fragments and crumbles to failure or, as we have seen consistently throughout the history of communist nations, it changes to oppress the people back into conformity. Either way, the communist society fails because it disintegrates or it perverts itself into totalitarianism, making the goal of self-sufficiency without government impossible to realize. It's well-intentioned but, referencing back to communism's simplicity, it's TOO simple as it fails to consider that people have hopes, dreams and desires in life and that those things will have a bearing on how and why each individual will want to live. The problem with self-sacrifice under communism: you must sacrifice those kinds of personal choices for the greater good of a collective society and, more or less, individuals won't stand for it sooner or later, especially those who want to to do more than merely exist as basically no more than a cog in a machine. Sooner or later, individual spirits will clash with the collective order in much the same vein as individual workers clashing against a crummy corporation. Whether it be by corporatism (oft confused with capitalism but, rather, is a perversion of it) or communism perverted into totalitarianism, you're crushing the human spirit. And that's why, ultimately, Mr. Reagan's quote is eloquent and, above all, correct.