However, as the financial crisis and current U.S./global recessions have demonstrated, the West, and Americans, should not view the fall of centrally planned economies as a 100%, unqualified win for the vastly superior market-based system. That's because just as orthodox communism has been discredited as an economic philosophy, so to has market absolutism -- the belief that the free market -- unbridled and left to its own natural forces -- is the solution to every economic, social, and political problem.

Further, it was collective action -- and massive government spending and monetary policies to keep credit markets liquid -- in 2008-2009 that prevented the global financial system from veering into the abyss -- interventions that continue to this day.

Moreover, the United States has it's own gathering market-based storm: the problem of falling, real wages in many job segments, caused by globalization, automation, and the decline in unionization. Some economists argue that wages will rebound when U.S. job creation resumes. Other economists take a more-sobering view: arguing that absent an increase in unionization and other income supports, real wage declines will continue in the United States -- leading to a system in which there aren't enough Americans with incomes adequate to support GDP growth.

We're way too early in the globalization era to reach any informed conclusions regarding U.S. wage trends, but for now know that the fall of the Berlin Wall did herald a new birth of political freedom and free markets in the East. It did not mean that the U.S's economic system was perfect, egalitarian, or the most advanced form of economic activity and social organization.

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Financial Editor Joseph Lazzaro is writing a book on the U.S. presidency and the U.S. economy.