A few years ago, the US Central Intelligence Agency declassified a document from the 1980s that recorded some of the jokes the Soviet Union citizens made among themselves during the communist reign of terror.
One of these jokes was: “A man walks into a shop. He asks the clerk, ‘You don’t have any meat?’ The clerk says: ‘No, here we don’t have any fish. The shop that doesn’t have any meat is across the street’.”
The insight that citizens of the Soviet Union had, which Western intellectuals who praised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and continue to praise communism do not have, is that in economies where there is a great deal of central planning, shortages of goods and services are inevitable.
