French political philosopher Montesquieu enumerated several virtues of markets. One in particular stands out for me. It is his argument that markets civilize people by promoting manners. Anyone who has worked in the private sector knows well that the quickest way to cause the demise of a commercial enterprise is for the owners or employees to engage in behaviors that offend or alienate customers.
The Ghana that I grew up in didn’t have much of a private sector to speak of. In many respects, it resembled a socialist country with an agrarian economy. The large population of subsistence farmers there mostly cultivated their crops on small plots of land. In the villages and small towns where farmers and most average Ghanaians lived, people were extremely nice and kind to their neighbors. That is still the case. For the most part, that rural population was the one engaged in a free market system. The farmers who sold their produce at food markets, and the men and women who marketed assorted wares in village squares, were always in competition with others and therefore had to be courteous to their patrons. It is the main reason that to this day, whenever I visit Ghana, I prefer to be in the village where I grew up.
Life was quite different in the cities, where the few formal jobs that existed in the country were based. Those positions were mainly in the public sector, and because the people who held them were not subjected to market-based competition, they were somewhat ill-mannered. They displayed the worst forms of elite arrogance and often acted as if they were gods. If you were poor, you felt the sting of their haughtiness constantly.
It was from that environment that I went to the Soviet Union as a young man for my university education. Most of the horror stories that I heard about that country prior to my travel there turned out to be alarmism. I encountered a Soviet society that was quite welcoming. Within the general population, there was little of the arrogance that I had observed in some circles in Ghana.
There was one particular place in the Soviet Union though that I always dreaded going to. It was the government office in Moscow that sold train tickets for international travel.
The vast majority of foreign students spent their winter and summer vacations in Western Europe. In my case, it was usually West Germany for the short winter break and England for the summer. Pretty much everyone traveled by train because it was inexpensive and convenient. The other benefit was that one could spend short periods of time in any of the countries along the way before making it to the final destination.
Because of the multiple segments of the train journeys, the tickets were issued in the form of small booklets. They looked like passports. If a traveler left Moscow and wanted to spend a day or two in Warsaw or somewhere else in Poland before continuing the journey, a train conductor would simply stamp or tear out the page corresponding to that leg of the trip and preserve the remainder of the ticket. That flexibility came at a cost though, in the amount of time it took the clerks to issue tickets.
The ticket office was rarely crowded in all the years that I visited. But the clerks worked at such a slow pace that quite often, not everyone could buy their tickets in one visit. Some had to go home and come back the next day. That was a problem for people like me who didn’t live in Moscow. Whenever that happened to me, I had to seek overnight accommodation with a friend who attended university in the capital. That was a huge inconvenience to fellow students who lived in small dormitory rooms.
The worst part of the ticket-buying experience was that there were never enough chairs in the office for customers to sit on. There were a few times when I had to stand for hours, only to find out at the end of the day that I would have to return the following morning to repeat the ordeal. Even in that socialist system, I always thought the clerks could have cared a little more about the welfare of their customers. But they didn’t.
On my travels to England, I almost always stopped in the Dutch city of Utrecht to visit a family friend who lived there. On one occasion, I decided to take a detour to Amsterdam to see another family friend.
The Utrecht train station is a major hub in the Netherlands and is an extremely busy place. I nearly shelved the plan to travel to Amsterdam that day because the ticket lines were exceedingly long. I had left the queue I was standing in to head out of the station to catch a bus into the city but turned around momentarily, just out of curiosity. I couldn’t believe what I saw. In those few minutes, the line had shortened considerably. That encouraged me to rejoin it and within a short time, I had my ticket in hand. I made my way to the platform to board my train to Amsterdam.
As the train pulled out of the station, I contrasted what I had just experienced with what I often went through in Moscow. It occurred to me right away that competition, or lack thereof, was the underlying difference. The clerks at the Utrecht station were working in a system where their jobs, and what they earned, were highly dependent on how they performed. To a large extent, that was not the case in the Soviet Union. In that socialist system, worker productivity wasn’t much of a consideration. There simply wasn’t much incentive for those clerks in Moscow to please their customers.
I have lived in the U.S. for thirty-four years now. The private sector plays such a dominant role in this country that its culture sets the tone throughout American society. There are indeed pockets of arrogance in America. I have come across individuals who exhibit a variety of off-putting behaviors. But by and large, the ultra-competitive atmosphere in which the vast majority of us operate does promote good manners.
I spent enough time on both sides of the Iron Curtain during my years in the Soviet Union to see the many differences between capitalist and socialist systems. Living in a capitalist society is not easy by any means, especially for the poor for whom life is constantly on a knife edge. But based on the totality of my prior experiences in Ghana, the Soviet Union and Western Europe, I already had a more favorable view of free markets. What I observed at the Utrecht train station that day served as validation. It permanently turned me into a capitalist.