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Cliffs notes: Eccentric Whole Foods CEO is a Ron Paul revolutionist while his shoppers are "yuppie gastronomes and fussy label-readers" and they're pissed he's

Cliffs notes: Eccentric Whole Foods CEO is a Ron Paul revolutionist while his shoppers are "yuppie gastronomes and fussy label-readers" and they're pissed he's pro-free market healthcare. Meanwhile, he defends "conscious capitalism" and looks to expand his 1% market share.

joe_the_user 17y ago
Hmm, Mackey is kind of nutty and so is his clientèle. What's the problem? (I'm long time customer myself)
DaniFong 17y ago
As an aside, the USA doesn't have anything like free market healthcare. Tax laws have given such an upper hand to health insurance companies, patent laws have given a huge upper hand to big pharma (particularly 'use patents', e.g. patenting a pink Prozac for PMS), and malpractice lawyers have doctors on the defensive. Now, doctors are likely to do something just to keep from being sued, pharma companies are free to charge whatever they want to certain classes of patients relying upon or otherwise using a particular drug (their preferred patient is one who will depend for life on a drug that they have the sole treatment for,) all of them have a huge information asymmetry advantage giving them even more monopolistic pricing power, and patients are often left in the dark, with close to no ability to reason about crucial and extremely expensive decisions (do you know what will be covered in your health insurance plan? Do you know what something will cost before you get the medical bill?) Plastic surgery might be one of the sectors most akin to a free market, since it's typically elective (save for reconstructive surgery) and hence insurance companies have less of a say. But still. --- The existence of a free market is an astonishing myth to be held so commonly. I exhort you to take a close look at a few business sectors, to see where the wealth and power is distributed. How many cities have more than one daily newspaper? In many sectors the advantages of scale are so great that it leads incontrovertibly to a few big players. The power of scale in certain industries is so great that in GE under Jack Welch, they were #1 or #2 in their sector, or they were out. And as soon as there's a monopoly, or an oligopoly, the tendency is to build this huge moat around their business, using whatever means available, and that freezes this supposedly free market even more.
- mattmcegg 17y ago
  I hope that wasn't directed at me. I 100% agree that we don't have a free-market healthcare system (ie totally unfair playing field, bureaucratic wastefulness and on and on). but, Mackey, Ron Paul, and myself see that kind of system is possible and would be best.
- mhb 17y ago
  Other good examples of how the customer benefits when there is more of a free market are orthodontics and laser eye surgery.

joe_the_user 17y ago

Hmm, Mackey is kind of nutty and so is his clientèle. What's the problem? (I'm long time customer myself)

DaniFong 17y ago

As an aside, the USA doesn't have anything like free market healthcare. Tax laws have given such an upper hand to health insurance companies, patent laws have given a huge upper hand to big pharma (particularly 'use patents', e.g. patenting a pink Prozac for PMS), and malpractice lawyers have doctors on the defensive. Now, doctors are likely to do something just to keep from being sued, pharma companies are free to charge whatever they want to certain classes of patients relying upon or otherwise using a particular drug (their preferred patient is one who will depend for life on a drug that they have the sole treatment for,) all of them have a huge information asymmetry advantage giving them even more monopolistic pricing power, and patients are often left in the dark, with close to no ability to reason about crucial and extremely expensive decisions (do you know what will be covered in your health insurance plan? Do you know what something will cost before you get the medical bill?) Plastic surgery might be one of the sectors most akin to a free market, since it's typically elective (save for reconstructive surgery) and hence insurance companies have less of a say. But still. --- The existence of a free market is an astonishing myth to be held so commonly. I exhort you to take a close look at a few business sectors, to see where the wealth and power is distributed. How many cities have more than one daily newspaper? In many sectors the advantages of scale are so great that it leads incontrovertibly to a few big players. The power of scale in certain industries is so great that in GE under Jack Welch, they were #1 or #2 in their sector, or they were out. And as soon as there's a monopoly, or an oligopoly, the tendency is to build this huge moat around their business, using whatever means available, and that freezes this supposedly free market even more.

mattmcegg 17y ago
I hope that wasn't directed at me. I 100% agree that we don't have a free-market healthcare system (ie totally unfair playing field, bureaucratic wastefulness and on and on). but, Mackey, Ron Paul, and myself see that kind of system is possible and would be best.
mhb 17y ago
Other good examples of how the customer benefits when there is more of a free market are orthodontics and laser eye surgery.