If you recall from the 80′s and Soviet style government, you might remember all the stories about standing in line for hours to get a loaf of bread or pair of shoes in the U.S.S.R before the wall came tumbling down.   The brilliant scheme of communism resulted in  grand rationing of even the most basic goods and services.

Flash forward 20 years later and the rationing seems to have shifted to rationing in the United States.   Although the rationing I speak of isn’t exactly the same thing, the net result is the same.  As I travel around the world I am completely dumbstruck at how the TSA is unable to run as an effective and efficient organization.  At virtually every airport, there are long lines to get screened through security.   Long lines, government bureaucracy, inefficient all keywords reminiscent of those found in the soviet union?

It doesn’t stop at government run enterprises either.  I can name a few things off the top of my head that are so out of whack that “rationing” is the most appropriate word for it and here’s a brief list:  Healthcare, Energy, Food,  Education.

While supply isn’t necessarily constraint in our environment it is “rationed” through cost and availability for most people.  The root cause of “rationing” of course is artificial inflation but that’s a story for another post.

It is ironic that as the collapse of the soviet union ushered in a new era of world wide capitalism whose primary net result appears to be the creation of a “rationing” effect across the world for basic necessities.