Just looked up the source, apparently it was during the 80s and was Mikhail Gorbachev, and I scrambled a bit of the details, and the author of the text too does

Just looked up the source, apparently it was during the 80s and was Mikhail Gorbachev, and I scrambled a bit of the details, and the author of the text too does not cite a source but refers to it as a popular story. I wonder if Google can dredge up something to substantiate it. "In the 1980s, the last premier of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, traveled to Great Britain and met British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. According to a popular story, when Gorbachev was touring with Thatcher, he was surprised to see how well off the British seemed to be. He asked Thatcher who made sure that the British people got fed. "No one," she told him. "The price system does that." The British people got fed far better than the subjects of the Soviet Union, who languished under a planner economy." pg 220 Invidivisble: James Robinson, Jay Richards