Empty Shelves and Shortages Were Common In The Communist Bloc

 Empty Shelves and Shortages Were Common In The Communist Bloc

BY JOHN SCHROEDER

A friend of mine came back from a visit to communist Poland in the 1980’s telling a story about soda water.  Soda water was a treat sold by street vendors.  Traditionally it came with a squirt of flavoring of some sort in it.  However, during the communist era shortages grew so intense and pervasive that the street vendors took, rather tongue-in-cheek, to selling it “without lemon” or “without strawberry.”  One day a customer, trying to join the fun and the lighthearted protest asked the street vendor if he could have his soda water “without cherry.”  Not missing a beat, the vendor responded, “I’m sorry sir, but that is not available today.”

Haven’t thought about that joke in a couple of decades – that is until I walked into the grocery store here in California yesterday.  I am just returned from my Tennessee home where some things are hard to get (had a furniture order that has been pending for five months pushed back another four) but generally store shelves were full.  Not so here in the People’s Republic of California.  While things are not quite as bad as during the early days of the pandemic, there were entire very naked sections of the store.  I was reminded of my own visit to the Soviet Union where I witnessed people queued up for blocks because the store had socks available for the first time in a couple of years.

If you are paying attention you will note that there are all sorts of explanations for the shortages we are experiencing – unions, pandemic rules, truck rules, labor shortage….  They all seem to play a role.  Let’s take one step back and try to look at a bigger picture.

We’ve all fiddled with a stress ball, you know, it looks like a rubber ball until you pick it up and squeeze a little, then it just seems to ooze out all sorts of cracks and crevices.  Have you ever tried to apply pressure evenly around the ball to compress it but make it retain is spherical shape?  Well, I’m just science geeky enough that I have and I am here to tell you, it’s impossible.  Human hands do not have enough control points on the system to apply the pressure evenly.  Not to mention the ball is filled with a malleable, but not compressible, material.  Even if you could apply pressure evenly it will not compress because of the nature of the filling – it’ll explode first.  The only way the ball will hold its shape is to cease to apply pressure.

Economies are like that.  The more you try to control them, the more they deform.  That’s why the communist bloc suffered from shortages all the time – it was the ultimate controlled economy and the more they tried to control it, the more out of shape it got and the worse the shortages became.  They responded with more control, not less, which eventually made that economy explode and communism fell.  The pandemic has been an exercise in economic control and now we are seeing the same problems that arose in the communist bloc.  The smart play here is to back off of control, not try to control our way out of the crisis.  Yesterday I analogized our efforts to control the pandemic to socialism.  Here is more evidence that my analogy is sound.

We are in one heck of a mess economically, in the public health arena, in the education arena.  We have applied pressure at all sorts of points trying to deal with an incredibly difficult problem and in so doing we have deformed these systems significantly.  Here’s the thing.  The longer they stay deformed, the more difficult it will be, and the longer it will take, for them to return to their natural shape.  Any additional pressure applied in rules, regulations and policies will only add to the deformation.  We simply have to let go – erase all the rules, regulations and policies that have been enacted since March 2020.  The result will appear chaotic, but it will be very short lived and soon things will quickly return to normal.

The alternative is that a disease we have already conquered will still win the day because we have beaten ourselves.  I for one do not wish to have to leave work and stand in line because word has hit the street that socks are in.   I’ve seen it first hand – it is an awful way to live.

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