Whole Foods Founder and CEO Says Socialists Are 'Taking Over,' American Liberties Are Threatened

(Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)

Whole Foods Founder and CEO John Mackey says American liberties are being “threatened” as “socialists are taking over” the United States.

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Mackey made these comments on Thursday during a podcast appearance with Reason Magazine. This is not the first time that Mackey has called out radical socialist policies. He has said previously that his viewpoint on economics is “conscious capitalism.”

Mackey said:

“My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over … They’re marching through the institutions. They’re taking over education. It looks like they’ve taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they’ve taken over the military. And it’s just continuing.”

Of course, as many of us know, socialists want big government; they want the government to control every aspect of our life, government-run healthcare, “community policing,” which is another word for abolishing the police, control what is taught in schools through the teachers union, abolish capitalism, and raise taxes to fund all their fantasy policies, including raising corporate taxes, which will only be passed on to the consumer.

Some of the politicians who tout these socialist policies try and paint it as “helping the working class,” and at times, they include the middle class in their messaging, but that is simply not true. Socialism has been tried, and it’s failed time and time again. Socialism has put more people in poverty; capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty. Some of these far-left politicians and their supporters want socialism in order for that to lead to communism. That was tried during the Soviet Union days when they combatted capitalism while promoting the goals of communism. It failed.

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It has not worked, will not work, and it will never work, but Mackey has a point. There seems to be a far-left movement in the United States, and if we don’t pay attention, they will do their best to get their way.

Mackey continued:

“You know, I’m a capitalist at heart, and I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values. And I feel like, you know, with the way freedom of speech is today, the movement on gun control, a lot of the liberties that I’ve taken for granted most of my life, I think, are under threat.”

He concluded, saying:

“From an investor’s perspective, the purpose of the business is to maximize profits. But that’s not the purpose for other stakeholders—for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community,” he said in a 2005 debate with Nobel laureate Milton Freidman and former Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers, “Each of those groups will define the purpose of the business in terms of its own needs and desires, and each perspective is valid and legitimate.”

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Repeatedly, Mackey has called out the academic community for promoting socialist ideas, which he calls “generally hostile to business.” He has also stated time again that capitalism is the “greatest thing humanity has ever done.”

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