By David Catron
The CEO of Whole Foods can’t seem to make up his mind.
As a general rule, I avoid “healthy” food whenever possible. I try to eat things with extra fat and lots of additives. This is a conscious strategy that should assure that I keel over before being left to the tender mercies of Medicare after the Obama administration has transformed it into a system that rations care based on a Byzantine formula that purports to measure how many “quality” years of life a patient has left. Moreover, if I consume enough chemical additives, I can save my family some money by arriving at the funeral home pre-embalmed.
For a brief period this week, however, I was on the verge of bestowing my custom on Whole Foods Market, despite its deplorable policy of “selling the highest quality natural and organic products available.” Why? Because it seemed that the grocery chain’s CEO, John Mackey, was that elusive creature for whom Diogenes searched so fruitlessly — an honest man. Mackey is currently promoting his new book, Conscious Capitalism, and has therefore subjected himself to a series of media interviews, including one recently broadcast on NPR.
During that interview, he was asked if his opinion of Obamacare had changed since he wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, “All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.” He answered as follows: “Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it — and that’s what’s happening with our health care programs and these reforms.”
One can imagine the gasps with which that “clarification” was received by the people on the set of Morning Edition. And it must have caused the Obamazombies among his Whole Foods customer base to react as if they had discovered lamb chops lurking among the bean sprouts and bottles of carrot juice. As the good folks at NPR gleefully noted in an update, “Many of you wrote in to tell us you were taken aback by Whole Foods top executive John Mackey characterizing the health law as fascism in an NPR interview, and apparently, he’s feeling a little sheepish.”
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