A couple weeks ago, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey wrote an excellent piece on health-care reform in the Wall Street Journal—I posted on it at the time—drawing lessons from his company’s experience with health-care benefits and laying out a free-market alternative to Obamacare. The result has been a nasty backlash from leftists who are outraged to discover that their favorite socially-responsible grocery store isn’t dedicated to all their socialist causes; there is of course a petition (isn’t there always, these days?), which declares,
Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.
“Deceived”? Really? Has Whole Foods ever claimed in the past to support socialized medicine? No, the “deception” is all in the mind of folks on the left. They simply and unquestioningly assumed that because the company is opposed to factory farming and other aspects of the modern agricultural industry, it therefore must be equally liberal on every other point; now, since its CEO has revealed himself not to be a socialist on the issue of the day, they assume he must have been lying about everything else—and must be, among other things, “anti-union.”
Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, ludicrous. As an example, Michelle Malkin offers this letter from a Whole Foods employee:
I work for Whole Foods, and I am a long time loyal employee. I love our company, and our CEO! John Mackey stands for what he cares about and believes in! This company offers awesome benefits and puts us team members first!
She also cites a commenter on the company’s online forum, who writes,
- Mackey lectures at Universities about the horrors of factory farming
- He says “Right now, Americans have to pretend factory farms don’t exist. They turn their eyes away, because there’s no alternative, there’s no choice. Once there is a choice, we will allow ourselves to be outraged.”
- He makes $1 a year and donates his stock portfolio to charity.
- He set up a $100,00 fund to help his employees with personal problems.
- He’s a vegetarian and his company will not buy from producers that treat their animals unethically.
- He flies commercial, rents the smallest cars, and stays in the cheapest hotel rooms – not because he’s cheap, but because he has no need for largesse
- He and his wife participate in yoga
- He gives over $1 million a year to animal welfare groups, education, relief work, and spiritual movements.
- Employees have full say in who they work with—a new employee must receive a 2/3 vote in order to make it past probation.
- Employees also vote on all company-wide initiatives
- There’s a salary book in every store—“no secrets” management believes everyone should know how much everyone else is making
- Executive salaries are capped at 14 times the lowest workers salary—If they want more money, everyone else has to get more money first
- Non-executive employees hold 94% of company stock options
- Pay is linked to team performance—profit sharing
- At least 5% of annual profits go to local charities
- Full-timers get 100% of their health care costs paid for—under plans the employees have selected
- “They just have a lot more respect for you as a person here,” says an employee
And because he had a different idea about how the United States can fix it health care situation, none of this matters? He’s a caring person and many of you want to treat him like a monster. Why? Not because he opposes reform, but because he’s bringing more ideas to the table.
Read her whole post; the person who e-mailed Malkin that comment has a remarkable account of falling in with Mackey and his friends on the Appalachian Trail and spending a few days hiking with him.
As for the commenter and his question: yes, because Mackey had a different idea from the Left, none of that matters; as Andrew Breitbart points out, such is the true nature of the liberal idea of tolerance. You see, it breaks down this way:
- Tolerance is the highest virtue.
- Tolerance means affirming everyone no matter what they believe.
- Except that, since tolerance is the highest virtue, we must not tolerate those who are intolerant.
- Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who are unwilling to affirm everyone no matter what they believe.
- Which is to say, we must not tolerate those who do not believe the same way we do about tolerance.
- Which is to say, tolerance is only for those whose beliefs we find acceptable.
Which is, definitionally, intolerance. I hasten to say, I have no necessary problem with that; there are certainly things which any rational person should refuse to tolerate, and we all have the responsibility to figure out where to draw that line. There’s no law saying that those who disagree with me have to find my opinions tolerable.
However. I do object to people cloaking their intolerance in the language of “tolerance” and calling me “intolerant” for disagreeing with them—that kind of Orwellian Newspeak is something which I find, yes, completely intolerable; and I especially object to them using it as a weapon to expand their own right to free speech while infringing on mine, and on the rights of those who share my positions. If they want to boycott Whole Foods, let them go on ahead—I don’t agree with it any more than I agreed with the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, but it’s their money, they can spend it however they wish—but the organized efforts we’ve been seeing from the likes of SEIU and the Obama administration to silence dissenters on Obamacare are quite another matter.
And if you don’t believe that restricting free speech and silencing dissent from the party line is what this is all about, just look at Canada, and its system of “human-rights commissions”; they’ve turned into ideological kangaroo courts, determining which speech is protected and which isn’t, all based on their own ideas of what they would prefer to tolerate and what they wouldn’t. Fortunately, when they went after Mark Steyn (because the Canadian Islamic Congress didn’t like what he said about the effects of Muslim immigration), he fought back, and he had the kind of public profile and financial backing he needed to win; but not everybody is Mark Steyn, and not everybody has the tools and the support to defend themselves effectively, and so the result is still the chilling of freedom of expression.
That’s why Steyn said what he did in his testimony this past February before the Ontario Human Rights Commission:
The Ontario Human Rights regime is incompatible with a free society. It is useless on real human rights issues that we face today and in the cause of such pseudo-human rights as the human right to smoke marijuana on someone else’s property . . .—in the cause of pseudo-human rights, it tramples on real human rights, including property rights, free speech, the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence. . . .
It’s all too easy to imagine the Terry Downeys of the day telling a homosexual fifty years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. Or a Jew seventy years ago that there is proper conduct that everyone has to follow. That’s why free societies do not license ideologues to regulate proper conduct. When you suborn legal principles to ideological fashion, you place genuine liberties in peril.
He’s right.