I’m a big fan of John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. Not only is he a successful, job-creating entrepreneur, but he also cited my work (specifically, this budget analysis) when interviewed by the statists at Mother Jones.
He also has some good insights about the economics of Obamacare. Here’s the key passage from the Washington Times report.
The CEO of Whole Foods compared President Obama’s health care law to “fascism” in a radio interview on Wednesday, a turnabout from earlier comments in which he compared the signature reforms to socialism. “Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism,” John Mackey told NPR’s Morning Edition. “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.”
I’ve already provided my two cents on the underlying theory of Obamanomics, and I agree that socialism is not the right term.
Like Thomas Sowell and John Mackey, I think that it’s technically more accurate to say that Obamacare is fascism – nominal private ownership but government control.
But I’ve also concluded that it’s a distraction to use that term. Which is why I prefer to call Obama a statist or corporatist. Though maybe we should add redistributionist to that list.
P.S. Here’s the Obama version of Socialism for Kids.
International Liberty 
[…] term for this system of private ownership/government control. It’s called fascism, though I prefer referring to it as corporatism or dirigisme to distinguish what Warren is doing from the racist and […]
[…] term for this system of private ownership/government control. It’s called fascism, though I prefer referring to it as corporatism or dirigisme to distinguish what Warren is doing from the racist and […]
[…] should be careful not to label people as socialists if it’s more accurate to refer to them as statists, redistributionists, cronyists, or […]
[…] Based on insightful analysis from Thomas Sowell, John Mackey, and Ronald Reagan, it may have been more accurate (albeit snarky and inappropriate) to have used a […]
[…] One business leader got a lot of heat for observing that Obamanomics was more like fascism than socialism. And another caught a bunch of grief for […]
To expand on the last (not including the PS) paragraph of the post, there is a good reason not to mention the f-word: the “progressive” model is indeed close to that of Mussolini and Hitler, but the reason M+H are notorious is not their economic model. It seems fair to say that their notoriety is based primarily on their insane drive for territorial expansion, which ultimately led to their early deaths and the ruin of their countries.
In this respect, it seems to me that the closest to them were Napoleon, Hideki Tojo, and Saddam, at least in the last couple of centuries. Not only Obama does not qualify: not even Francisco Franco qualifies.
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I have to give Mr. Mackey credit for having the cojones to make such statements, given the fact that most of his client base seems an advocate of global democratic green totalitarianism (and his stores seem to have a split personality on that issue too), which, I imagine has a high ideological correlation to the democratic imposition of uniform mandatory redistributive healthcare.
I’m sure leftists, after demonizing him, will ultimately capitalize on his comments, promoting a conversion from fascism to socialism by completing the ObamaCare journey and socializing not only the cost but also the means of production.
ObamaCare cannot survive in its current form anyway. ObamaCare pushes US healthcare in that grey highly unstable area: Regulated enough that markets no longer function, yet not regulated enough to prevent various private entities to rent seek by gaming the system. That situation predates ObamaCare, but ObamaCare represents a definitive choice (whether conscious or not) by the American People to resolve the instability by moving US healthcare towards full socialization.
After many decades of attacks on America’s funding principles, the American people have finally worn their competitive advantage to the rest of the world very-very thin. I believe that ObamaCare alone was enough to push them past the tipping point. Today’s relative calm is only a short respite as the momentum of America’s past comes to a halt. Then the ever faster vicious cycle of decline will take hold. The three billion awakening souls of the emerging world, have neither the patience not the desire to see how American efforts at prosperity through flatter effort-reward curves turns out. They will take no prisoners.
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Lastly, lets not forget that while regimes like fascism did not always follow the democratic process in their ascension to power, they did nonetheless enjoy strong majoritarian support. If you were not on board with those new waves of collectivist thought when they were rising, you were scorned by most people and intellectuals around you as a backward narrow minded individual who could not understand the trend, hope and change of the future. Democracy amongst an electorate that subscribes to mandatory collectivism is not much of an improvement over totalitarianism. That is why many people already feel freer in places like Russia, Dubai and quasi-democracies like Singapore, than they feel in democratic France. And that is why in this early twenty first century, where mobility of capital, services, and people is rising, democracies dominated by collectivist voter-lemmings face real competition from softer forms of authoritarianism. Because, in a mobile world, even dictatorships have to compete to provide a fertile and attractive environment to talent.
The natural selection of cultures based on survival of the most productive has a harsh future for voter-lemmings. Shielded from international competition during the futile suicidal, easy money, easy healthcare, easy education, easy housing, decline years of their flatter effort-reward democracies, their world competencies in shambles, who will offer safe harbor to the voter-lemmings once they kill their host? They have interesting times ahead. I see them scrubbing floors for more successful societies, still wearing their Obama T-Shirts and fantasizing “one day we will rise again”…