The line stretches around the block for a food pantry offering fresh fruit and vegetables in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I’m lucky enough not to need it, but even I spend much of my day waiting around. When I take my kid to a scheduled doctor’s visit, we wait about a half hour. If he gets an injury — as he often does, playing sports — and we have to go to urgent care, we will wait for hours. The emergency room at the hospital is longer still. And who can even track how long we are to stay on hold when we call our health insurance company? And then there’s the wait for the subway or bus.

Whenever the subject of socialism comes up, we hear about long lines and long waits. Breadlines in the Soviet Union. Long waits for Canadian healthcare. But we seem to do plenty of waiting without socialism.

Soviets did wait in line a lot, less often for “bread” than for meat, cheese, or more exciting commodities like port. On the other hand, except during wartime, most Soviets seem to have enjoyed food security, unlike one in nine adults in Brooklyn (and 11 percent of children in the same borough), hence the long lines at my local food pantry. Capitalism, on the other hand, has greatly increased Russians’ vulnerability to health problems associated with an unhealthy diet and poor nutrition.