My second trip to Russia was very different from the first, in that it took place after the fall of the Soviet Union.
This time, we were permitted to stay under the roofs of Russian citizens. It proved to be an eye-opening experience.
Donna and I were guests in the home of a fairly well-known Russian TV broadcaster and his wife. For various reasons, I don’t want to identify them, so I’ll call him Yuri and her Svetlana.
Yuri and Svetlana were part of the cultural elite. They were better off than many other Russians. Yet they still lived in a dwelling that wouldn’t qualify as Section 8 welfare housing in most cities in America.
We slept in their—well, I don’t know what it was. The living room was also their master bedroom. Sofa here…bed over there. Besides their very small sitting area—where our bed was—they had a kitchen and one small bathroom the size of an SUV’s cargo area. All the pipes were exposed.
And remember, these people were the elite.
One night, Svetlana said she was going to cook us a meal at home.
“Do you want to go shopping with me?” she asked.
“Sure,” we said, even though it was the middle of Russian winter. But I’d never been out grocery shopping with a Russian housewife in the middle of a Russian winter before. Why not? I thought.
Svetlana put a cloth bag over her shoulder, and we left. We went down the rickety stairs of the dilapidated apartment complex and into the cold.
Our first stop was a bread store. Buying bread, it turned out, was a hit-or-miss proposition. These were still the early days, and free enterprise—capitalism—hadn’t yet seeped into the economy. There were no supermarkets, no one-stop shopping.
“We’ll see if they have any bread,” Svetlana said.
Luck was with us. The store had a couple of stale loaves, and we grabbed one.
Next we headed to a dairy store, in hopes of scoring some cheese. It was dimly lit and horrible-looking. Again, most of the shelves were empty, but we took the best of what was there.
After that we trudged on to the meat store, which had flooded a little bit from the melted snow. We actually had to slosh around in mud as we walked to the display case. We were able to put our hands on a couple of really terrible cuts of meat, from some creature that I suspect might have been pulling a garbage wagon just a few days earlier.
At the vegetable store, we finally struck out. Nada. There was nowhere else to go.
These were the government-run “grocery” stores that served Svetlana’s neighborhood. You want to eat, this is where you buy your food. Piling into the car and going to a restaurant just wasn’t an option. Oh, there was one little bistro in their neighborhood, but one evening meal for two there would cost nearly a month’s worth of the average Muscovite’s salary.
Nevertheless, Svetlana did an incredible job of preparing our repast.1 We promised to return the favor someday, and we did. (More on that later.) For now, let’s get back to the government schools, the real purpose of this trip down a cold Russian memory lane.
What if grocery stores in the United States were all run by the government, the way our schools are?
A far-fetched proposition? I think not.
After all, people have to be healthy enough to work and make a living. The government could easily have decided it needed to make sure everyone has groceries, just as it decided it needed to make sure everyone has an education.
The process would be simple. A “nutrition tax” would be added to your property tax bill. From the proceeds of that nutrition tax, your family would be permitted to purchase a set amount of groceries from your assigned grocery store over the course of the year.
Your grocery shopping experience would be dismal. Selection would be limited; quality would be marginal.
In our government-run grocery stores, you wouldn’t be able to choose between Dole packaged salads and American Garden packaged salads. There wouldn’t be different brands of dairy products or meat or breakfast cereal. You would basically buy what the government deemed fit for consumption. My guess is that it would be bland, unimaginative, and tasteless at best.
The voters would probably elect local “grocery boards” that would make policy decisions on what would and would not be carried. Political hacks would run for positions on the local grocery board, with campaign promises of a wider selection and lower prices. You would know their promises to be empty, but you would cast your hopeful vote anyway.
Every neighborhood would have its grocery store, but not of the Mom-and-Pop variety. Your zip code would dictate where you were allowed to purchase food. That store, and that store only, would have your grocery account information. You would be permitted a certain dollar amount of purchases every week. If you wanted more, you would have to pay out of your own pocket. If you wanted to shop elsewhere, you would have to spend your own money.
It’s a safe bet that the workers at these government-run grocery stores would be unionized. The workers would earn more than they could in the private sector, but that would be fine, since their jobs would be so important.
Now let’s say someone—maybe me—comes along and says, “You know what? These government-operated grocery stores just aren’t working out. We’re getting an inferior quality. Nutritionally, we’re not being served. We need a voucher system.”
A voucher system, you say?
“That’s right. We need the government to issue vouchers for groceries, so that people can take the vouchers for redemption at the grocery store of their choice.”
Wow. Imagine that!
“And anybody can get into the grocery business. All you have to do is meet certain health and quality requirements. If you want to open a grocery store, go ahead. That way, people can decide for themselves. If they want to shop at a government store, fine. If they want to shop at your store, fine. They can just use their vouchers anywhere they want to shop!”
Well, that’s just a little too logical, isn’t it?
Of course, you know what would happen. First, the unions representing grocery workers would scream bloody murder. They’d condemn the voucher plan, arguing that it would hurt the poor. They’d claim that only the wealthy would be able to go out and shop for groceries.
Sound familiar? I’m not going for subtlety here. I’m reaching for the 2 x 4 again.
We would get the same arguments against vouchers for grocery stores that we get against vouchers for education.
A few months after our second trip to Russia, Svetlana and Yuri got to visit the United States. Needless to say, they were in awe.
“How could you afford this?” Svetlana asked when she saw our house.
“This is a middle-class home,” I explained.
On her first full day in America, my wife, Donna, and I took Svetlana grocery shopping. This time, however, it wasn’t in the harsh winter streets of Moscow. It was in a huge farmer’s market in Atlanta. One of those giant, cheerful places where you walk in and see stacks and stacks of fruit and vegetables of every description.
As we entered, I peeled off to find a shopping cart. I returned to find Svetlana frozen in her tracks after taking only about five steps into the place.
She was just standing there, in disbelief, with tears running down her face.
“Who shops here?” she asked.
I told her the truth:
“Anybody.”
Even for Russia’s wealthiest citizens, nothing like this farmer’s market existed in her homeland. To Svetlana, it was a paradise.
I will never forget the look on her face—the look of a citizen of the former Soviet Union experiencing her first taste of what capitalism and the competition of the marketplace can bring to the lives of an ordinary citizen.
There is no reason in the world this same magic can’t be brought to our system of education.
That’s our next chapter.