For one, poor people, and we were all equally poor, could not afford a car or a home. Should they have saved and scrimped their entire lives collectively in the family, the economic police were always on the prowl, looking for people who had more resources than the socialist/communist man was allowed.
Single family homes were out of reach for the proletarian masses. They had to rent the concrete and steel high-rise apartments while giving up to government confiscation of their single-family homes and their land for “the good of the people,” who needed more agricultural land.
As a socialist/communist economy was not based on supply and demand, just on the centralized government’s five-year economic plan, there was always a shortage of most consumer goods, including cars. It is true, you could only purchase the one model produced in the country, the Dacia. A Dacia cost around 70,000 lei during the 1970s while a concrete apartment cost around 30,000 lei.
To put the car price into proper perspective, the average salary then was about 800 lei per month. A person would need to save his entire salary for 87.5 months (about 7.5 years) to buy his own Dacia, assuming that the spouse would pay the bills and provide food and clothing.
A buyer had to pay upfront the full price of the car and wait for it to be produced and delivered by the factory whenever they felt like it, the wait list, or the assembly line permitted.
Sometimes the wait was as long as 10 years because the inept economic planners under communism were unable to deliver even the most basic goods like food and medicine, much less a car.
The wait for phone installation was 14 years. You had to go to the post office to order the phone service, pay a fee, and wait. We would ask the frowning clerk jokingly if they would install the phone in the morning or afternoon and she would say, irritably, “what difference does it make, it’s 14 years from now!” Our answer would always be, “the plumber is coming in the morning.” She never appreciated the jocular tone of our sad reality. We got our phone service when I finished high school and dad had applied for it when I was of kindergarten age.
The Communist Party elites, on the other hand, could get whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. A simple phone call did the trick and the requested item(s) arrived at their house in a relatively short period of time, depending on the type of merchandise.
Another element of communist life was the lack of basic health services and pharmaceutical drugs. We are not there yet in America, but the variety is dwindling for over-the-counter drugs in highly populated areas.
In the socialist economy controlled by a one-party rule, the Communist Party, even vitamins and aspirin were missing on shelves and medicines had to be compounded, providing that the ingredients were available on the market. The capsules that contained the compounded powder were huge and made of dissolvable paper. I cannot tell you, as a child, how difficult it was to swallow these horse-sized capsules filled with bitter tasting, choking powder.
In our American economy, the shortage of goods in highly populated areas is quite steep, including cars. Unless you are extremely rich and buy a high-end priced car or a Tesla, you can no longer walk into a dealership and expect to leave with a car that day even though you may have the money, all of it.
In the Biden economy, you have to reserve a car, put down a certain amount, and wait 6 to 8 months to receive it. For now, it is 6-8 months, but the wait time will increase as we slide more and more towards an inept socialist economy which is not based on supply and demand but is controlled centrally by one party, the communists. Today, the controllers are the socialist Democrat Party and their enablers, the establishment Republicans.
The moral of the story is, be careful what you wish for. Keep vilifying capitalism’s free markets and wishing for a socialist/communist economy, and you shall get it.
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