Thanks to Kamala Harris for reminding us of the evil stupidity of price controls

The USSR and East Germany had price controls on food for 40 years. It's why people had so little to buy in grocery stores, lines for TP were so long and there were no BOGO sales on ice cream.

I saw the virtually empty grocery shelves of East Berlin in 1988, when I spent six hours touring the gray and dreary streets of one of the Evil Empire’s top cities.

Here’s what I wrote about my visit to a grocery store after I escaped back to West Berlin.

Before I reached my ultimate destination, the main East Berlin post office, I discovered a neighborhood supermarket into which a steady stream of serious shoppers was pouring.

I entered, looking and feeling extra-conspicuous with my 35-mm camera and new $65 Reeboks. The busy market was a Kroger or Ralph’s in size and configuration, but it was a cruel parody.

Bread and cheese sausages were in relative abundance, but the produce department was a pathetic bunch of bins full of potatoes, lumpy beet-like things and mutant lemons, the only citrus product.

The single frozen-food case contained about 20 packs of unidentifiable chicken parts. The aisle shelves were loosely stocked with generically packaged goods. The whole scene was slightly surreal. Up close and personal, socialism no longer seemed funny.

Capitalism and the West have their faults, but this was depressing.

These grim-faced shoppers — no different at all from their fat and happy and free brothers and sisters in West Berlin — were perfectly aware of how out of it they are, politically and economically.

But they were stuck on the wrong side of the Wall and I felt sorry for them. It was hard to believe the standard of living is higher in East Berlin than it is in Moscow.

My life under communism:

The Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989. In April of 1988, when the Soviet Union's evil empire still looked strong and the Wall was still unbreachable, I caught up with my brother Dan's touring rock band Kingdom Come in West Germany.

I wrote an article for the L.A. Times about my search for a popular cafeteria on the communist side of the Wall in East Berlin.

A year and a half later, when I was at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Wall was cracking and about to come down, I wrote this version about what I learned from my brief life under Communism.

The grocery store shelves of East Berlin that I saw — like the shabby government-run cafeteria with its awful steamed food and the heavily censored shelves of the government-run book store — were depressing. They were only slightly less sad as Moscow's were in 1991. The shelves in two other socialist paradises, Cuba and North Korea, have been as bare for decades.