by David Safier
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has kinda walked back his assertion that the Affordable Healthcare Act is "fascist," though saying it was a bad choice of words doesn't exactly qualify as a detraction.
It's probably time to look back at the head of the health-conscious yuppie's favorite store [NOTE FROM DR. WORD: the "Young" in "Young Urban Professional" probably needs an update after all these years]. A 2010 New Yorker article talks about Mackey's antics when he wanted to purchase Wild Oats (he successfully bought the company).
[F]or nearly eight years, he had been secretly logging onto an Internet message board devoted to Whole Foods stock under the sock puppet, or pseudonym, “rahodeb” (an anagram of Deborah, his wife’s name), praising his own company, disparaging Wild Oats, and throwing in a flattering remark about his hair (“I think he looks cute!”).
The article goes on to describe Mackey: "a vocal libertarian, an orthodox free-marketer, an admirer of Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand. In the 2008 Presidential election, he voted for Bob Barr—Ron Paul wasn’t on the ballot."
The New Yorker article also paints him as one degree farenheit below a full-blown climate change skeptic. He says we don't know much about the causes of climate change.
[H]e added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow “hysteria about global warming” to cause us “to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.” One would imagine that, on this score, many of his customers, to say nothing of most climate scientists, might disagree. He also said, “Historically, prosperity tends to correlate to warmer temperatures.”
Apparently he's changed tried to lower the temperature on his climate change views as well. Yeah, he says, climate change is real, but it may be a good thing.
"[C]limate change is perfectly natural and not necessarily bad. In general, most of humanity tends to flourish more when global temperatures are in a warming trend and I believe we will be able to successfully adapt to gradually rising temperatures."
