Vietnam is doing pretty well actually.

I mean, the USSR didn't have hyperinflation until they were trying to redo the recipe at the end. "Money is real, and making more will help" is honestly a weird line of reasoning for people who hate "capitalism".

Depending on how you define smart, sure, there's been smart ones. At this point there's an accumulation of evidence markets work better than the Soviet system of markets+random constant intervention, but that wasn't always the case, and even now there's people who are smart but have Ben Carson syndrome, and think because they're good at their field they understand economics, and can quantify it's limitations with no research.

By some people's standards I'm a communist, too, since capitalism is poorly defined, and communism is often just defined as the opposite of it.