Our plane landed at JFK at 10:30 p.m. after a nine-hour flight from Istanbul. Our day had begun in Riga, Latvia, where my wife, me, and our adopted Latvian daughter had been visiting, the Latvia trip being her high school graduation present.
Trans-Atlantic flights, especially when one travels in coach, are always an ordeal, but our ordeal really began after we had landed and were herded into the passport line. With a heavily-tattooed official barking commands at us, we dutifully lined up to try to enter our country. Machines read our passports, approving those of my wife and daughter, but rejecting mine, which meant I would have to present mine to an official sitting in a glass booth.
Unfortunately, the line went very slowly, and, at midnight, one of the two officials checked out, leaving the rest of us waiting in line for two hours. Finally, at 12:30 a.m., I showed my passport to the man in the booth who glanced at it and said, “Welcome to America.” Indeed.
While in line, I had given my fanny pack to my wife, as it held our money and credit cards, and she handed it back to me as we were leaving the building. Instead of snapping it around my waist, I held it in my hand, placing my passport back into the pack. Because of my having to wait for two hours, the last shuttle to our motel had already gone, which meant we had to catch a taxi.
Our driver was a Sikh—like many other cabbies in New York—and he quickly took us to our motel. I watched him drive away, failing to get his Medallion number, something I would quickly regret. As I began to check into the motel, I realized I didn’t have my pack with me. After checking to see if I had dropped it on the ground, it hit me that it was on the floor of the cab, which was long gone.
The motel let me check in, anyway, since I had stayed there a couple weeks before, and a motel employee took us back to the airport to see if we could find the cabbie. Unfortunately, he had left for the night, ours being his last ride. So, we were stuck. Our money, credit cards, and passports were lying in a cab driven by an unknown driver. My wife called the central taxi office, and after she described him to an official, the man replied, “Lady, you have described half of the cab drivers in New York City.” It seemed hopeless and I was in outright despair.
But here is where the real story begins. First, someone took us to one of the main yards where the cabbies were gathered. As we quickly learned, the typical New York cabbie hails from countries like Bangladesh, India, and various West African nations. After we spoke to some drivers, someone let us in the dispatcher’s office, where the people were very helpful—and encouraging. As for the people we met in that yard, none were white, but no one there cared that my daughter and I were. They promised to help.
By 4 a.m., we were back at the motel. My wife assured me that things would be OK, but I wasn’t buying it. I knew that these things were gone forever, and without money, IDs, and credit cards, we wouldn’t get out of New York any time soon. I didn’t sleep very long.
The next day, my wife contacted her cousin, who lived with her husband just across the Hudson River near the George Washington Bridge, and she invited us to stay with them. We had enough money on hand to take the Long Island Railroad to Penn Station and then catch a cab to the water taxi port. By then, we had spoken to someone at the central office for New York cabs and it seemed he had made it his mission in life to find the cabbie in question and solve our problem. At that point, I realized something special was happening, something I had not believed possible.
People I didn’t know, people who didn’t know me, people who were busy, people who had their own worries, those people decided that I was getting my stuff back that I had so carelessly lost. And I did.
While waiting at the Long Island Railroad station just beyond the JFK Air Train, I received a call from our motel. Our cabbie had brought my pack to the motel, and that I needed to come pick it up. Every prayer was answered and nothing had been taken out of the pack. (I did give the cabbie $100 as a reward).
So, in the end, my goods were retrieved and all we lost was a day when we were supposed to be traveling home to Maryland. In the meantime, I was able to see a stunning view of the Manhattan West Side as our water taxi shuttled us to New Jersey so we could spend the night with relatives. The next morning, we caught Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor to Washington, DC, and then the Amtrak to Cumberland, Maryland.
But what is the lesson, if any, for this story, and where does it fit into our own political economy theme of this page? Is it just something that feels good for Christmas, even though it happened in July? After all, it is a nice story, but in the end, one can say that everyone from the cabbie to the employees of the central office just did their jobs and there was nothing miraculous about something that is relegated to lost and found.
But there is something else to understand, and we see it in something that we are tempted to see as mundane but really isn’t. Undergirding everything here was something we call trust, and for all the analysis we do when describing a market economy (even a regulated economy as we see in our country), we should remember that our system cannot survive without it. The idea of trust is easily forgotten, but it is a glue that ties things together—and is always undone by government regulation.
The rules under which New York cabbies operate, not to mention the union rules and expectations of employees in the central office, are based on everything but trust. In fact, they are written in part to undermine trust, replacing a trust-based system with coercive rules and procedures. There is nothing in the regulatory regimes that now govern increasing numbers of economic transactions that enables trust, but plenty to create and maintain mistrust. Moreover, many of these cabbies come from cultures where lying is accepted and where the kind of trust we take for granted here is hard to find.
For whatever reason, however, trust ruled on that night in New York City. It wasn’t a Christmas miracle or even a July miracle. Instead, it was what happened when people were left to do the right thing.
