Everyone is insane

Respond is thus

Seriously. I want ideas. Even if they are half-cooked or incomplete assessments of the problems. A proper debate needs inclusion of different viewpoints, if only to see what's wrong with our own vantage points. If there was something wrong with what he said, which to my own half-cooked view there were a few glaring errors, particularly where he strays into proclamations of how to live a healthy life (essentially: Buy my food! Shop here!), here, correct it and move on. That's the basic nature of a civil debate. Establish an agreed upon set of data and argue over the value points moving forward.

The basic plot was summarized aptly here:
"Socialized health care helps poor people.
John Mackey owns Whole Foods, a company that offers high wages for unskilled work.
John Mackey doesn’t like socialized health care.
I’m not shopping at Whole Foods any longer."

Which is, to me, totally illogical. You can certainly complain about the insistence on employer tax benefits continuing to exist even alongside individual ones. Or complain that it's not a single-payer option funded with state taxes. Or that tort reform is a distracting side issue that explains a very minor portion of the rising costs. Or that HSAs aren't appropriate for all consumers, aren't available because of state mandates, or any number of other complaints. But to presume that this is now an evil company because it's CEO put forward a considered plan of his own based on the success of his own company and its employees and a few half-cocked facts about the nature of the insurance industry and rising costs generally? Even at best, it devolves the conversation down to the level the extreme right has tried to make it into (and largely succeeded, sadly) with bald associations with socialism and Godwin's Law as a daily invocation. I had hoped there might remain some bastions of sanity.

Mackey himself was guilty of this by framing the health care reforms on the table now as socialism (opening with a Thatcher quote) before proceeding to present otherwise sensible policy recommendations that one can freely disagree with or present counter-arguments for without rash name calling and evil ever present "socialism" dropping into the conversation. To be sure there are cost constraints that need to be accounted for somewhere (b/c we cannot afford to pay for all the health care people WANT, nobody can), but to call the ideas that are out there socialised medicine misses the boat. Again, somebody should be an adult in this country and learn how to argue or disagree agreeably. If it won't be the right or its moderate support within business and economics, it has to start somewhere.

Whole Foods as a company, sort of like Home Depot a few years ago, or Google, does a whole bunch of things for their work force that nobody "should" get all that upset over (it does do a few things that are worth taking them to task, but not all that different from other grocery chains, namely the practice of "local" or "organic" labeling). It's practically the model plane built for enlightened capitalism; the combination of values and economics (and of course, high prices set to cover those values). If you're feeling a growing urge to protest something from years of practice being annoyed at the corporatism of our society, I'm quite sure Glenn Beck will oblige by saying something utterly insane this week. He wouldn't be able to without a corporate machine funding his behavior. Go complain to them.

Update: He followed up here I think I wish I could be that abrasive in writing. But I'm usually not.