It's Zwickau, 1985. You are putting your name on a list for a Trabant 601. You are 27 years old. By the time the car arrives, you will be 37. A decade of waiting for a vehicle whose two-stroke engine and Duroplast body (cotton waste pressed into resin, because East Germany had no steel to spare) had not meaningfully changed since 1957. Think about what that decade-long list actually tells you. A waiting list is a price signal that the state has gagged. In a functioning market, a queue that long screams one thing: raise production, raise the price, let competitors in, do something. The VEB Sachsenring plant did none of these. It couldn't. There were no competitors, no profit-and-loss feedback, no entrepreneur scanning the gap between demand and supply and rushing to fill it. Ludwig von Mises explained why in 1920: without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods, and without real prices, no rational calculation. The Trabant is the manifestation of such a system. The car produced 26 horsepower and roughly 100 grams of hydrocarbons per kilometer, nine times a contemporary Western engine. You mixed oil into the gasoline by hand at the pump. The fuel gauge was a dipstick. There was no tachometer. Demand never softened, because the alternative to a bad car was no car, and the planners read the waiting list not as failure but as proof of how beloved the Trabant was. Compare West Germany over the same span. Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes iterated constantly, killed off bad models, and answered customers who could walk down the street and buy a rival. Same Germans. Same engineers. Same work ethic. The only variable that changed across the Wall was who owned the factory and whether prices were allowed to speak. When the Wall fell in 1989, Trabants jammed the checkpoints heading west, and within two years their owners abandoned them in the streets like trash. The market delivered a verdict in 24 months that the central planners had refused to hear for 32 years.