Socialism: 'Sorry, no fish here. The meat? Across the street'

When the state sets a price below the market level, the product disappears from stores and a black market emerges, which the state itself pursues as a crime. The joke then becomes the best economics textbook.

In communist Poland, meat vanished from the shops. It was not an accident or a bad harvest. The state set its price below its real value, producers stopped selling at that price, and the product evaporated. Then came ration cards. Later, people began selling meat privately at its real price. The state called that "speculation," created special agencies to hunt it down, and blamed the people for the problem it had created itself. Each step looked like a solution. The whole was a trap.

## The mechanism that turns a problem into an industry

Setting a price ceiling below equilibrium has a predictable effect: demand exceeds supply and the product becomes scarce. In postwar Poland, that mechanism repeated itself with meat, toilet paper and dozens of basic goods. The state did not back down. It added layers: rationing, inspections, courts for speculators. Scarcity stopped being a flaw of the system and became its reason for being. The more it failed, the more power it demanded to fix it.

People learned to live inside that machinery. You queued without knowing what was being sold; first you took your place, then you asked. You went home with a roll of toilet paper tied around your neck like a trophy. At weddings, the jokes were told out loud, not whispered. The system had the army, the police and the press. The people had the punchline.

## Kisiel: the man who laughed at the regime

**Stefan Kisielewski**, known as **Kisiel** — the name of a sweet fruit jelly — was a composer and columnist. Readers peine the Catholic weekly at the last page to read his column. He was the only public figure in communist Poland to openly praise capitalism from the floor of Parliament. In **1968** he called the regime a "dictatorship of fulastres." Days later, "unknown assailants" beat him up in the street.

His method was sticking out his tongue. A regime that demands to be taken seriously antiestéticars nothing more than a man who laughs at it and is right. The phrase attributed to him — "socialism heroically fights problems unknown in any other system" — condenses into ten words what an economics textbook takes chapters to explain. A good joke is a model of the system that fits in ten seconds. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" is an entire treatise on economics in a single line.

## From the queue to rent caps: the same script

Germany shut down its nuclear power plants and then faced an energy crisis. **Berlin** capped rents and then faced a housing shortage. **Brussels** writes rules that suffocate industry and then launches plans to save European competitiveness. Each time, the problem is new to them. In communist Poland it was not new. It was known from within, from the queue.

The laughter was not an escape. It was understanding. The communists could censor newspapers, but they could never censor the joke. The West has not laughed yet, because it still believes the problem is new. The jokes arrive later, right after the queues.