Whole Foods' 'Conscious Capitalist' 

When you don’t like what a word means you simply put an adjective in front of it. That’s what moderates like George W. Bush did with the “compassionate” conservative tag. It is what Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey is trying to do with his trademarked “Conscious Capitalist” brand movement. Let’s hope he has even less success than Bush.

The current issue of Fast Company did the research and the story on Mackey and Whole Foods. I like Fast Company, though it is not as “fast” as it was in its youth … but then neither am I. The business magazine staff actually did a nice job with Mackey, and defied a bit of its own liberal and too-green leanings with their story.

Basically Mackey, and his inarguably successful Whole Foods company claims to have figured out the moral balance of capitalism and is ready to share. Quoting Friedman and Rand, as if he were their first readers, Mackey dishes “the way” as if it were the plot of a Jet Li movie. He is “the One.”

His theory is simple: “Businesses that are more conscious of making a positive difference in the world make the world a better place from just being there.” Cool. No argument from me. But what makes a positive difference? There is the rub, and to the Mackeys of the world the answer is always a liberal one.

Which business exactly makes a positive difference in the world, one that reduces ocean pollution or one that makes body armor for police? One that sells filtered water in no-carbon-footprint hemp bottles or one that serves as the first employer of many teens and sells quarter-pound burgers and fries? For the conscious capitalist the answer is easy … and remarkably consistently lefty.

It is not that we shouldn’t study Whole Foods, it is a great company, a meteoric rise, and passionate customers. I like all of that. And it is a hard slice of the food market in which to be successful. Healthy food co-ops are struggling, just like Pocatello’s Natural Foods. With the economy down evidently shoppers go for value over tofu.

But like Bush, Mackey has a word problem. By feeling a need to adjectivize “capitalist” he is defining capitalist as one who is not conscious of the world’s needs. He is preying on the perceived vulnerability of capitalism today with peoples’ concerns over executive pay and bonuses.

Allen Ginsberg taught us that “whoever controls the language, the images, controls the race.” That will be the future for Capitalism. We must protect the term from Mackey and his ilk and ensure that it needs no adjective, it needs no apology, it needs no defense. Capitalism. There, it stands alone, just fine, as it should.

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