Economic Systems - Remember the Bad Old Days?

Here is an interesting item from the BBC (HT to Carpe Diem).

It seems that the hot game in Poland is about shopping in the old days - when Poland was a communist country. It's based on the queues that people had to wait in to purchase just about anything.

If you want to show students a similar situation, I recommend the first few minutes of the movie Moscow on the Hudson. Although the relevant cut takes place in the old Soviet Union, the story is essentially the same. See a queue? Stand in it and buy whatever is being sold.

When we talk about economic systems, we sometimes to remind students that price is a rationing mechanism that distributes goods according to willingness to pay. (Students should be able to connect to that if they read anything about ticket prices, parking prices, airline, and hotel prices in Dallas last week.)