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Grundle first:
Your post to Icky was fine, until you started lambasting him/her with personal attacks. However, even that aside, I am willing to bet you have heard of at least one person who voluntarily defected to a communist country. Usually, this happened in the 40s and 50s, with people returning home from the war only to become disillusioned with the lack of jobs created by the sudden glut of available laborers. One rather famous individual, a marine, defected to the soviet union, only to defect back a couple years later even more disillusioned with their society: Lee Harvey Oswald.
Now, what you failed to mention, and Icky failed to realize, is the fundamental flaw with communism: where's the incentive. As an ideal, communism is wonderful. In practice, it is totally unworkable. It overlooks the fundamental problem that people are by nature greedy and short-sighted. An ideal that if they work hard, the whole society will improve means nothing to the farmer. The whole society means nothing to the ignorant peasant, and if you educate the farmer, s/he will want a job that makes use of that education and doesn't involve the grueling hours or slaving behind a plow. Also there's the "From each according to his[/her} ability, to each according to his [/her] needs" quote. Who determines what those needs are? A committee? The committee decides you don't need that tractor for your potato acreage, but the farmer with 5 more acres than you growing wheat does? Or worse still, the farmere with half as much land growing a more valuable/rare crop needs the tractor. Or, we have decided that you will be a pig hearder, your sister will be assigned to the dairy farm, and your brother will be a poet. Such a committee arbitrarily assigning jobs is a waste of tallent. Maybe the sister has a talent for pottery and should be sent to the kiln instead. The committee would decide. There is no freedom of choice. Taking it a few steps further, who decides who needs to get married, and to whom, and if they should have children, and how many? Communism work wonderfully, until you realize that you are not the one making the decisions. The planned economy is foolish. The planners would have to be more educated than anyone else, and up to date on every single facet and invention. Even with our modern tech and the internet, is is an impossible task.
Icky, I challenge your assertion that the current generation is not doing better than predecessors. The current generation lives in greater wealth and luxury than any previous generation has ever known. Look around you. Prior generations had no where near the level to tech and comfort now available, available not just to the wealthy, but to everyone. Both technology and the economy are still climbing ever upward and expanding into directions no one ever immagined even 10 years ago. If you are willing to work for it, you can have anything. If it is outside your reach, it won't necessarily be outside the reach of your children. See social mobility.
As for things getting worse, the only thing I see in decline (which would affect the earning power of the "average" person is the continuing decline in the quality of US education, where standards continue to drop every year. The only solution I can see to this is a complete and total overhaul of the system, starting from basic principles and working up. This would also entail a stronghanded return to harsh reality, and forcing students to earn their diplomas rather than just serving time for them.
As to the conditions of workers in foreign sweatshops, you are overlooking one thing: yes, their conditions are horrible. Yes, they border on inhumane. BUT: They are preferable to the alternative. You views are based on your standards in the US. Go see the conditions people live in, where overpopulation (the population exceeds what the local economy can support) is rampant. From their eyes, working 12 hr shifts in factories where every facet of you private life is invaded is preferable to starving to death. They have not dole, no welfare system, no security net. The gov't can't afford it. And that's in the Free gov'ts. In the oppressive gov'ts or dictatorships, work or die. The population exceeds the economic infrastructure's ability to support it. (you can thank the catholic church's anti- birth-control/woman=breeding machine stance for a lot of that)
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