Was it really worth dealing with? We were pulling out of the
parking lot of a White Castle in Nashville, and my college friend
Mike had just realized that we had been overcharged for our pile of
burgers. After some consideration, we decided to back up and turn
into the drive-through again.
With no other cars in front of us, we coasted to the window, and
Mike explained everything to the cashier. There was a short pause,
and we prepared for the worst. The thing is, when you’ve lived in
New York City, you’re conditioned to expect that any consumer
dispute will be a major hassle or a potential altercation. But
things worked differently down here. The young cashier threw up his
arms and exclaimed, “Well, let’s figure it out!”
Huh? You mean, he was actually going to cooperate with us,
resolve the problem in a calm and rational manner, and do so
happily, without giving us dirty looks or rolling his eyes?
Within 90 seconds of our initial wavering about whether we were
going to deal with the situation, we peeled out of the White Castle
parking lot a few dollars richer, with our burgers still warm. We
were a pair of stunned Yankees.
This incident was one that made me realize that it isn’t a myth:
once you get out of Northeastern cities, people are significantly
more civil to one another. It wasn’t until I did some more
traveling that I came to understand that this had nothing to do
with people in other parts of the country being inherently better
(no offense to any Southern readers), but rather, it was a matter
of numbers. That is, the more people there are in a given area, the
more likely it is that people will come into conflict, and the less
likely that they will treat each other with basic decency.
In the 1950s, psychologist John B. Calhoun did some crowding
experiments with rats, and found that as population density
increased, males became more aggressive, violence ensued, and
rodent society broke apart. This is something that holds true
wherever I have visited throughout the world, and it’s amazing to
observe how easily my own behavior can be influenced by my
environment.
When I visited Omaha, Nebraska, I became a much friendlier
version of myself. Yet while touring some of China’s congested
cities, when people kept cutting in front of me in lines, I became
frustrated by my inability to curse at them in Mandarin and was
forced to whip out my New York elbows from their holsters. Driving
on open roads out West is a pleasant experience, but when dealing
with bottlenecks in the New York to D.C. corridor (or even worse,
I-95 in southern Florida), I adopt the mentality of a gladiator and
the vocabulary of Joe Pesci.
This is one of the reasons why—beyond my ideological and
practical policy disagreements—I marvel at the inability of
liberals to grasp what a massive public backlash is in store should
they achieve their dream of national health care. Liberals want to
give free or heavily subsidized health care to millions more
people. At best, the number of doctors will remain the same (though
that number could shrink if the government slashes reimbursement
rates as part of the effort to cut costs). A combination of more
demand for services, a stable or shrinking supply of physicians,
and price controls can result in only one thing: much more crowded
doctors’ offices and hospital emergency rooms, with far longer
waits.
While citizens of other countries are accustomed to socialized
medical systems, this sort of thing won’t fly in America, where
people are much more impatient and demanding. Sure, Americans want
medicine to be cheaper, and ideally they’d like to see everybody
covered, but despite this, a CNN poll released in March found that
more than eight out of 10 Americans are satisfied with the health
care they receive. How will they react when taking a kid to the
doctor’s office replicates the experience of navigating rush-hour
traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike?
