John Mackey
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SUNNI: [laughing] Geez, John, you're getting ahead of me -- answering questions I haven't asked yet! So, what does it suggest to you about this country that two very different types of retailer -- Whole Foods Market and Wal-Mart -- are both so profitable?
JOHN: It means that the mass market is segmenting in food -- just like it is doing in every other category as well. Some people want the cheapest food and some people want the highest quality food with high levels of customer service. Wal-Mart meets the first group of people and Whole Foods meets the needs of the second group.
SUNNI: You've mentioned your management style, and I would like to explore that more. It's certainly worked very well, but it doesn't seem to be a very libertarian one. Do you see your management style as paradoxical given your libertarian philosophy?
JOHN: Most corporations in the United States are hardly the epitome of libertarian utopias. In fact, most corporations in the United States are organized as top-down, command & control, hierarchical systems. Very little personal freedom exists in these corporations. Their employees are often managed through either pure financial incentives -- greed -- or through fear -- "my way or the highway". Whole Foods is very, very different. Our mission at Whole Foods can be summed up by our slogan "Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet". We put great emphasis at Whole Foods on the "Whole People" part of this mission. We believe in helping support our team members to grow as individuals -- to become "Whole People". We consciously use Maslow's hierarchy of needs model to help our team members to move up Maslow's hierarchy. As much as we are able, we attempt to manage through love instead of fear or greed. We allow tremendous individual initiative at Whole Foods and that's why our company is so innovative and creative. Most retail companies create a prototype retail store format and then cookie-cutter reproduce it across the country. Think McDonalds. Not Whole Foods. We have no prototype store. All our stores are unique. Why? Because our team members are constantly innovating, experimenting, and improving them. Whole Foods is very much committed to a Hayekian discovery process and our team members -- both as individuals and as members of teams -- are leading this Hayekian discovery process. As our team members learn and grow as individuals, as they become self-actualized, as they become "Whole People", our company better fulfills its mission to all of its stakeholders.
The seeming paradox that you keep hinting at is no paradox at all. Human beings are both individuals and members of communities (or collectives). We learn and grow best through relationships and our growth will always be limited without them. I haven't met anyone that I consider to be self-actualizing who did it all by themselves. Freedom as an ideal is a very, very incomplete ideal when it lacks love. Freedom is my highest "political ideal", but love is my highest "personal ideal". We need both. There is no paradox and there is no contradiction here. Freedom and love: let us marry these two together!
SUNNI: [laughing] Now that sounds like a marriage made in heaven, John! And thanks for not taking my pushing here too personally; I actually don't see it as a paradox either, but I imagine that you know of people in the pro-freedom community -- I sure do -- who seem to have an almost phobic reaction to anything that moves beyond the individual level. I'm an individualist, but I'm no idiot -- we're social animals, and one of the things that interests me most about libertarians -- especially as a psychologist -- is how they approach those two aspects of human nature.
JOHN: Some libertarians may be using their political ideology as a psychological defense to avoid the challenge of further personal growth. From a psychological standpoint the challenge for all of us is to simultaneously continue to individuate as individuals while also integrating closer to our communities. In my experience, libertarians are more enthusiastic about the individuation part than the integration part. However, psychologically healthy, self-actualizing people need to be doing both.
SUNNI: A very interesting observation, John ... and of course, if the individuals aren't psychologically healthy, it's very difficult to create a vibrant, pro-freedom community. This reminds me: I've seen people call you an anarchist, but in other places I've read others who claim you think some government is necessary, which would make you at the very least a minarchist. Which is it?
JOHN: I'm not an anarchist. Of course government is necessary. Without a monopoly of force by some institution -- let's call it "government" -- we will have various violent gangs and private armies struggling for political control and the winner will become the de facto government. While government is necessary the never-ending political challenge is to find ways to keep government in check. "Who guards the guardians?" remains a huge philosophical issue. The United States has done better than most other countries in this regard with the creation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the various governmental checks and balances. Unfortunately, as we both know, government has been steadily gaining in power ever since the United States came into being. What is the solution? There is no simple solution--just the ongoing and continual quest by people who care about freedom and individual rights to work to expand them and lessen governmental power. Progress can be made. For example, there is much more freedom in Eastern Europe than there was 30 years ago.
SUNNI: Yes, there's been a lot of progress, but I think many would say that's in spite of the kind of government you're speaking of. I don't want to focus on this too much, but I'm curious about how you might think a monopoly of force by any institution can be genuinely limited, short term as well as long term. It seems to me to be the nature of powerful institutions to always work to retain, and gain, more power.
JOHN: Competition is the best way to limit any power -- economic, social, political, or military. For example, it is good that our states have to compete for businesses and citizens. To some extent this puts a limit on their ability to tax their citizens because many will vote with their feet and move to a different state. California has been driving business to move to other States for a couple of decades now. Our federal government could obviously use more competition as well. As financial capital becomes more and more liquid and mobile it will be increasingly easy to move it to more favorable tax homes and more free locales. That may be illegal, but it will increasingly happen anyway if our federal government becomes too oppressive. Breaking the federal government's monopoly on money is obviously very important. I think we are pretty near to doing that right now with increasing competition to the dollar from the euro and eventually the yuan. People and businesses will be able to denominate their investments and assets in whatever currency they have the most faith in.
So competition with other nations will become increasingly important as a check on our federal government's power. Obviously Constitutional amendments could be very powerful checks as well, but are difficult to get into law. Probably the most important thing we can do, however, is continue to fight the good fight for more liberty. Citizen activism can make a huge difference in the world and frequently has.
Liberty has always fought an uphill battle throughout history. You can pretty much name any period of time in history that you wish to, and if you study it carefully, you'll see that liberty was always very constrained. There never was a golden age for liberty. I would argue, in fact, that right now there probably exists more absolute personal and political freedom across the entire globe than at any time in history. Even here in the United States. We tend to forget how little freedom that women and minority citizens have had in America throughout our history. There has been tremendous progress made in these 2 areas within my own lifetime. We tend to forget the progress we have collectively made and instead focus more on what has been lost or not yet gained. Progress tends to advance in more of a spiral fashion than a straight line upward.
SUNNI: Hmm. I'll have to think about that, John; I'm not convinced that competition is a sufficient check for an institution with a monopoly on force. It seems to me that decentralizing force is the best course. But, back to Whole Foods Market. I read that you were pretty upset after the Madison Wisconsin Whole Foods Market voted for a union -- not surprisingly, since most unions aren't private or voluntary organizations these days. Yet I know some libertarians who are pro-union. Can you give me the short version of why you think unions aren't beneficial?
JOHN: I've written a 17-page pamphlet (a chapter in my upcoming book) called Beyond Unions. In it I outline my philosophy towards unions. I can't do complete justice to all my ideas briefly. Let me just make a few points.
The right to collective bargaining (unionization) is an important legal right. It is important that employees, when they wish to, should have the legal right to form unions. In countries where unions are outlawed we see massive totalitarian exploitation of workers. Solidarity in Poland was a very important force to liberating that country from communism.
No employee should be forced to join a union against their will. Unfortunately in many states in our country, such as California, once a union is voted in by a majority of the employees, employees no longer have free choice in this matter. This closed shop means they must join the union and pay dues to the union whether they wish to or not. If they don't join then they are fired. I believe open shops should be legal in all states and no employee should be forced against their will, as a condition of employment, to join a union.
