Whole Foods CEO Issues Warning About America: 'I Feel Like Socialists Are Taking Over'
The CEO of Whole Foods sees storm clouds ahead for America in a world where a new generation shuns work and socialism is on the rise.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey shared his thoughts in an interview with Reason editor Nick Gillespie. Mackey will be stepping down as CEO on Sept. 1.
“My concern is that, I feel like, socialists are taking over,” he said. “They’re marching through the institutions.”
“They’re taking everything over; 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,” he said.
Mackey said the changes are undermining much of what he values in America.
“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 said.
During his interview, he said that COVID-19 lockdowns were “the stupidest thing government will have done in the 21st Century.”
He said that benefits doled out during the pandemic made it harder to hire workers.
“A lot of people were making as much money, or more money, not working at all. And so guess what? They chose not work, and they’ve been reluctant to come back to work. They got used to it,” he said.
“I don’t understand the younger generation,” he said. “They don’t seem to want to work,” he said.
“They only want to work if it’s really purposeful, and [something] they feel aligned to,” he said, noting that major metro areas were having the hardest time getting workers.
“You can’t expect to start with meaningful work. You’re gonna have to earn it over time,” he said.
“Some of the younger generation doesn’t seem to be willing to pay that price, and I don’t know why,” he said.
Mackey said last year that amid changing times, capitalism needs to evolve, according to Fox Business, in part to counter the anti-capitalism narrative pushed in colleges.
“Otherwise, the socialists are going to take over — that’s how I see it, and that’s the path of poverty. They talk about trickle-down wealth, but socialism is trickle-up poverty. It just impoverishes everything. That’s my fear, that the Marxists and socialists, the academic community is generally hostile to business. It always has been. This is not new.”
“That’s why we’re seeing this move toward socialism — because capitalism they see as inherently corrupt,” Mackey said. “That is wrong. Capitalism is the greatest thing humanity’s ever done. We’ve told a bad narrative, and we’ve let the enemies of business and the enemies of capitalism put out a narrative about us that’s wrong. It’s inaccurate and doing tremendous damage to the minds of young people.”
Mackey said socialism does not work.
“Socialism has been tried 42 times in the last 100 years, and 42 failures. It doesn’t work. It’s the wrong way,” he said. “We have to keep capitalism. I would argue, we need conscious capitalism.”
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