We moved to the Netherlands in 2016, from New York City, where I had lived for over thirty years.

Here all jobs provide a living wage, and there just doesn't seem to be an issue with it. There are plenty of crappy fast food places and they stay in business for decades. The Dutch really believe in capitalism; someone is making money of those businesses.

And there are several unexpected results. One is that employers ask for, and get, professionalism and competence. The workers are treated like adults, and are expected to respond that way, and they do. I remember the first time I saw a cashier in Germany - I was honestly terrified by her throughput and my inability to bag fast enough, even though she was, well, not nice about it but didn't care one way or the other. I realized it was the first time I had seen a professional cashier.

Watching store clerks work with cheerful, steady efficiency making intelligent decisions made me realize how I had only seen that in American in small, employee-owned businesses.

Another surprise was the happy older person working in a "menial" job. We used to go to this one coffee chain with our dogs in the off-hours, and the two people who worked there were extremely cheerful and quite funny, even though they had to wear hideous uniforms and were working in not even a high end coffee shop.

Once I realized that they had an undemanding job that paid them enough that they didn't have to worry about being homeless and there was no reason they couldn't enjoy their work and do a good job at it, it suddenly all clicked in.

My best story on this was when someone from the city came to take out some "temporary" construction out on a bridge here. He was an older guy, probably in his 60s, doing manual labor - in New York, he'd have been an angry man.

Here, he was smiling all the way. The weather was nice, and people walked by thanking him for doing it. There was no foreman, just this guy. He worked carefully, unhurried but steadily for a couple of hours, and made what had seemed to me to be permanent construction vanish as if it had never been.

Let's flip it over, in fact. If someone's business plan depends on paying the workers so little that they cannot live, why should we as a society subsidize their business incompetence?

A better world is possible, and we should demand it, because the alternative is the American system as it is today.