Lots of good reasons to love America

A few reasons second-generation Russian immigrant Karol loves America (from an enjoyable account of her induction as an American citizen a quarter-century ago), reasons that will I think be heartily seconded by people who have spent a reasonable amount of time abroad:

I love (and I know this is going to be seen as a minor thing but go live elsewhere and you'll know that it's not) that things work here. They function. You can order a burger in the middle of the night. You can't order much anywhere else in the world and certainly not after dark. You can call a toll free number for almost everything. In Britain, you have to call something like a 1-900 number at some ridiculous rate just to find out the train schedule. There is airconditioning in every office building, car, bus, train, store and museum. I almost died in the Louvre in August. [More than 10,000 elderly Parisians in literal fact did die in the Paris heat wave of 2003. -- Peril] Nobody looks at you funny when you order something off the menu with a few changes. You can't imagine the glares I got in Europe when I would just ask for no mayo. You can return clothing to big department stores, with no receipt, months after you've bought something. Customer service is an oxymoron in most other countries. The same department stores are open until around 8pm most days, 10pm during the holiday season. Don't even imagine it's like that anywhere else. 5pm is a stretch. My brother's 20 year old girlfriend is making $15 an hour at her summer job as an intern. My brother is taking a history class called 'World War I' for credit at a local college for the summer even though he is a pre-med student at a different school. Trying doing either of those last two things anywhere else in the world. Elsewhere, pay often goes according to age and don't even think about deviating from your subject matter at University, let alone taking classes as a different University and expecting them to count towards your degree. And on and on. It's these little things that I love the most. It's those exact things that can't be replicated, the easy way everything goes here. As I get older they are the things I appreciate most.

What I don't think George W. Bush (like Woodrow Wilson before him) has ever grasped is that this, not democracy, is what people long for. Democracy has absolutely no intrinsic value except when, and only insofar as, it goes to free people from the violence and fraud that constrains the limitless human ability to find creative ways to meet other people's needs as a way to get one's own met -- which is all the free market is. If Dubya had set out four years ago to establish safety and property rights throughout Iraq instead of trying to establish "democracy," things might be a whole lot different there today.

Or not, of course. Speculation is just that.

But the difference between how things work in America, between how good America is at making it easy for you to get the things you need and want (especially in those parts of the economy that the government doesn't run, such as Wal-Mart, as opposed to the parts of the economy that the government does dominate or heavily distort by its interference, such as public education and the health care system)...that ain't speculation. That's hard reality, baby.

The good ol' U.S.A....no greater country on earth. Which I say even though given my druthers I'd choose to live in Kazakhstan.

HT: I'm embarrassed to say that I can't remember which blog it was that pointed me in Karol's direction. My sincere apologies to whomever I'm depriving of due recognition.