As a young American service member arriving in West Berlin in the 1980s, I was pretty surprised to see you could just hop on a subway without passing through a turnstile or showing anyone your ticket. And everybody paid anyway!

Having grown up in a very conservative world, I was also really surprised to see that German working people seemed to have much more comfortable lifestyles than American working people. Young people my age lived way better, with nicer homes, more spending money, and much more leisure time. Not only did they work fewer hours, they had 30 days paid vacation per year at a minimum, plus sick days and national holidays. Oh, not to mention free health care and free university education, free trade school, and paid apprenticeships.

I figured there had to be a catch, something I was not seeing. The economy had so many socialist elements, it had to be about to collapse.

Well, decades later and the German lifestyle is still one of the envies of the world, even after reunification, which came at an enormous economic cost to the western portion of the nation. (A little more cooperative socialism for you, I guess.)

I lived in Berlin for 5 years and have been back several times since, and the German people with their “socialism” still lead markedly more prosperous lives than most Americans. But we’re conditioned not to believe that, to believe instead that we’re the greatest nation in the world with the greatest lifestyle ever seen.

I wish some of us would travel more.