Posted on 06/13/2006 11:55:52 AM PDT by Marxbites
I've been there, so the things that John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, says in the June 2006 issue of Liberty magazine essentially ring true.
Whole Foods is big now, one of the nation's fastest growing mass retailers, with sales last year exceeding $5 billion and a gross profit of more than $1.6 billion — not a bad return in the grocery business.
It didn't start that way. Coming out of the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Mackey, a vegetarian, a former long-haired and bearded commune resident, a student of ecology, yoga and eastern philosophy, writes that he idealistically opened a small, food store in 1978 with his girlfriend, with a total capital outlay of $45,000. The store lost $23,000 in its first year.
His philosophy at the time, he explains, wasn't exactly pro-profit or pro-capitalist: "Politically, I drifted to the Left and embraced the ideology that business and corporations were essentially 'evil' because they sought profits. I believed that government was 'good' (if the 'right' people had control of it) because it altruistically worked for the public interest."
He'd been taught, Mackey explains, that "business and capitalism were based on exploitation: exploitation of consumers, workers, society and the environment." After a year in business, he saw a reality that didn't mesh with his decades of anti-business indoctrination.
"I believed that 'profit' was a necessary evil at best and certainly not a desirable goal for society as a whole," he writes. "However, becoming an entrepreneur completely changed my life. Everything I believed about business was proven to be wrong."
Rather than seeing a milieu of "exploitation" and coercion in his store, Mackey saw a system of freedom and "voluntary cooperation" at work and a new realism: "No one is forced to trade with a business; customers have competitive alternatives in the marketplace; employees have competitive alternatives for their labor; investors have different alternatives and places to invest their capital. Investors, labor, management, suppliers — they all need to cooperate to create value for their customers."
In short, an entrepreneur like Harvard dropout and Microsoft founder Bill Gates (or John Mackey) got his money first and foremost by creating a new pie, by launching an innovative enterprise with new products that created new wealth and income that spread to investors, labor, management, suppliers — and spread to the public at large by way of increased tax revenues.
"In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser," says Mackey. "It is a win, win, win, win game."
That's not the way Mackey's customers and employees saw it. Despite losing half his initial investment in the first year of business, Mackey was nevertheless accused of greed and exploitation. "Our customers thought our prices were too high, our employees thought they were underpaid, the vendors would not give us large discounts, the community was forever clamoring for donations, and the government was slapping us with endless fees, licenses, fines and taxes."
Mackey has voted straight Libertarian since those early days in 1980. Still, he says he's had little success in converting people to the concept of economic freedom or to an understanding of how the world really works, to the concept of how freedom, prosperity, human progress, spontaneous order and overall well-being are inherently channeled through a system of voluntary cooperation, private property, business competition and individual incentives.
"The freedom movement remains a small, relatively unimportant movement in the United States today," he writes. "As a businessman who knows something about marketing and branding, I can tell you the freedom movement is branding itself very poorly."
By incorrect branding, Mackey means that too much emphasis about individual freedom has been focused on side issues, such as the legalization of drugs, and not enough on the big picture. Instead, he maintains, if it's to have any chance of having a mass appeal, the freedom movement will have to consciously create a broad and inspiring vision, an idealism that addresses the direct correlation between economic freedom and societal progress.
The freedom movement, libertarians, and free market economists, he writes, have done a poor job of defending the social legitimacy of business, economic freedom, capitalism, individualism and free markets. The message should be that business, working through free markets, has arguably been the world's greatest force for human progress and our collective well-being, delivering increased prosperity, less poverty, extended longevity and democratic freedoms.
Ralph R. Reiland, the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. Send him mail. Comment on the blog.
See my links above for who and how this all came about!
Envious Progressives copied it directly from the euro-facist/socialists they publicly admired for the good jobs ruling their countries they were doing, like the Kaiser, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, the last three publicly expressing their respect for FDR & Churchill.
Stalin remarked upon FDR's death: "there goes my man in Washington".
My first thought too.
See the links I just posted - you'll like em.
I would like to think that thoughtful men, whether in business or not, would lead their communities away from socialist beliefs, but I'm afraid that every nation must work through its own socialist delusions before abandoning them when their society lies in ruins.
We humans do not learn from anyone's history but our own.
Libertarians ruin their message by the soical crap they try to force down people's throats.
Central Market is what HEB would be if it were in a gentrified neighborhood. (The same company owns both.)
Truth be told, I've been surprised at the wonderful variety of wine that's available, both at Central Market and at the larger HEBs around town.
And the cheese selection at Central Market cannot be beat, unless you want to schlep downtown to Spec's, Houston's cheese mecca!
I'd love to know where the original 45k came from.
bump for later read
Here's the link to the Liberty article. It seems he did read AS, along with a ton of other free-market books:
I stumbled into reading Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand — I read all of them. I said to myself, "Wow, this all makes sense. This is how the world really works. This is incredible." Then I became Laissez Faire Books' best customer for the next five years. I think I read every book in their catalog. If any of you in the audience have written books, I have probably read them....you'll have to read the article to find out. :-) I haven't read most of it yet - I printed it out for me & hubby to peruse tonight. It seems he's one of those aging-hippie libertarians many of us former LP'ers knew & loved. (Granted, he's an aging hippie libertarian who's the CEO of a $5 billion company, LOL!)...
How many of you have read Ayn Rand? How many of you have been influenced by her? "Atlas Shrugged" remains one of the five greatest novels I have ever read. Who can ever forget characters like Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia, from "Atlas Shrugged," as well as Howard Roark in "The Fountainhead"? These characters all demonstrated tremendous passions and drive, backed by high self-esteem. Each one inspired this young entrepreneur. I wanted to be just like those heroic characters in "Atlas Shrugged."
However, despite her literary greatness and many positive contributions to the freedom movement, I believe that Rand has also harmed the movement. How? She was overly...
Anyway, this paragraph is truly inspiring:
What I love most about the freedom movement are the ideas of voluntary cooperation and spontaneous order when channeled through free markets, leading to the continuous evolution and progress of humanity. I believe that individual freedom in free markets, when combined with property rights through rule of law and ethical democratic government, results in societies that maximize prosperity and establish conditions that promote human happiness and well-being.
. I read all those authors in my youth (good stuff). But the person that had the biggest impact on my thinking was Barry Goldwater (senator Arizona).
Interesting article. I knew nothing about the man, but I sure love his Whole Foods stores.
*blowing him a kiss*
i'm SO on this! I just spent a year's salary there a few days ago....
Mises BUMP!
Bump
Which crap would that be that is not aligned with the founder's constitution of liberty, and as limited a govt as possible consistent with the protection of our pre-existing rights we empowered govt to protect as it's sole purpose and only reason for being?
And what did Goldwater say about establishment govt and the influence the CFR has within it?
Col House it's founder was a socialist, who wrote a very telling little novel "Philip Dru, Administrator".
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