Yes, you were clear; I got that. Like I said, he can choose to do business, or not, under whatever conditions he likes. If he doesn’t want to buy from any company unless their employees spend the day naked and dipped in honey, that’s his choice. He’d probably go broke pretty quickly, but why is that any concern of yours?

I may not have been clear. Mr. Mackey is not content to not do business with Sonoma Foie Gras. His firm insists that anyone who sells to Whole Foods abrogate pre-existing contracts with Sonoma. Mackey isn’t content to compete with Sonoma, he aligns himself with PETA in attempting to deny anyone the ability to purchase from Sonoma.

“Kate Lowery, a company spokeswoman, confirmed its ultimatum to Grimaud.

“We will not do business with them if they don’t terminate their relationship with Sonoma Foie Gras,” she said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/dining/03gras.html?ex=1304308800&en=d120b16505abab45&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Whole Foods takes direction from PETA, whose executives have stated publically that “I think it would be a great thing if all of these fast-food outlets, and these slaughterhouses, and these laboratories, and the banks that fund them exploded tomorrow” and “blowing stuff up and smashing windows [is] a great way to bring about animal liberation.”

Interfering with another’s right to make contracts is violence. Threatening to blow up firms you don’t like is violence. Whole Foods is not only unethical, it is unprincipled and hypocritical. If they care so much about “animal rights” they would not carry meat at all – but they started out that way and quickly lost half their capital. Instead of facing their own dilemma, they choose to attack a small business that went out of its way to be transparent.

Despicable. Those who care about free markets and honest trade will shun Whole Foods.

So what? He can do business with whomever he likes, under whatever terms he likes. If Sonoma Foie Gras doesn’t like it, they don’t have to do business with him. This is not “aggression”.

I hope Sonoma Foie Gras wins and Whole Foods is forced to make restitutin for their actions. I have stopped patronizing Whole Foods despite a very convenient location on my daily commute and very high quality produce. I simply refuse to associate with those who use violence to achieve their goals and I urge all defenders of free market principles to do likewise.

Good for you. See: you, too, can do business with whomever you like. If Whole Foods actions here constitute “violence”, then surely so does your refusal to patronize Whole Foods! I hope you get sued, and lose, and forced to buy from Whole Foods! (No, not really, but I do hope you grow a brain)

Posted at 8:31PM on Jun 3rd 2006 by medleysoul

Mr. Mackey and Whole Foods don’t like certain foods such as pate foie gras. Most recently they decided to stop carrying live lobsters and crabs, again at the urging of their PETA advisors.

Of course Mr. Mackey is free to operate the company has he sees fit, although were I a shareholder I would be very concerned about the financial, legal, and ethical implications of his behavior and choices.

But Mr. Mackey is not content to let others make choices that he does not like. Specifically, Whole Foods informed distributors that they would cancel their contracts if the distributors did not cancel previously executed contracts to supply foie gras and other verboten items to others. See http://www.slashfood.com/2006/05/03/whole-foods-vs-foie-gras-behind-the-news/
Sonoma Foie Gras, the victim of Whole Foods aggression, has sued Whole Foods for “intentional interference with contract.”

I hope Sonoma Foie Gras wins and Whole Foods is forced to make restitutin for their actions. I have stopped patronizing Whole Foods despite a very convenient location on my daily commute and very high quality produce. I simply refuse to associate with those who use violence to achieve their goals and I urge all defenders of free market principles to do likewise.

One very pleasant outcome of Mr. Mackey’s attempted coercion is now I know the name and address of all three US foie gras producers. I ordered whole livers from each of them and have sampled one. It was exquisite.

It is not in the interest of government to teach anything other than that the alternative to the social contract is anarchy and thuggery. The US government doesn’t actively attempt to suppress libertarian property rights and natural law theory in public schools, but it provides little or no material to help it along.

Therefore the libertarian education movement must overcome what is very effective indoctrination of the young. That is that all rights, or at least property rights, are held by the individual only so long as they are in line with the good of the collective. The good of the collective being whatever the majority of voters, their representatives and the bureaucrats they appoint say it is.

So the industry is prospering but not ripping off the public. It cost money to keep the lights on and the insurance paid and the income tax and company lawyer and accountant paid. The patron in the store smelling the cantalope, is not aware of those costs and the plumbing bill that just came in for the $800 hot water heater that failed. He is also not aware of the one or two percent that isn’t collected because the credit card companies have to keep in business as well.

Its all ok.. remember, the only thing that those others have to sell is their time or their service. If not paid, they will not be there the next time their services are required and that stops the whole process. If you want to be able to smell the cantelopes in the future, then pay the extra few percent to keep the merchant in business.

My mistake. I misread your post. Such a story could be easily distorted by any statist as a too idealistic condemnation of lifestyle choices, and then slathered upon by the usual post-coherent cynicism that gullibe types are so easily swayed to these days.

These things tend to not even work with convincing the con statists. In fact, it works even less than in convincing a liberal. I think we know who the biggest admirers of power are right now: the ones in power.

I too tend to use the moral argument with my friends, and it is always convincingly successful. They are the usual jaded types, like most teenagers, yet most of them have that quiet agreement and acceptance of what I argue as true, yet won’t do anyhting about it (democratically, this is a great thing). They simply give the classic response: “It might work, but what will we DO about it?”. I just keep arguing and waiting for the state to grow so corrupt it becomes blatantly obvious. Even the Soviets fell. Of course, we haven’t had our outright Stalinist yet…

The moral line of argument has even worked well with my post-Bush hangover friends. Again, I wouldn’t waste my time on the hardliner neocons; they are half intellectuals and half privileged thugs (go to any University and see).

Perhaps the idea of market creativity, speaking your voice, tolerating others, not giving a damn about trends, (except trying to make your own for profits), the idea of imagination… Is what needs to be harnessed. Art is capitalism.

The issues which he chide libertarians which he may feel are mere “side issues”, e.g. “drug legalization, gun control, and so-called “lifestyle issues” are still EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to the libertarians who focus on them, and, for opposite reasons, extremely important to the Government’s armed goons who enforce the prohibitions. Mr. Mackay loses points when he talks like this, his good advice about improving our delivery of the message notwithstanding.

It is worth mentioning that politics and government is the LAST thing to change in society, not the first!

The second point is harder to say, since I sometimes get discouraged too, but we have done extraordinarily well, given the state of public opinion in the world after WWI, These ugly trends toward collectivism, authoritarianism, and socialism accelerated and intensified during and shortly after WWII, and didn’t really reverse themselves until the early “70s.

If Mr. Mackay is old enough to remember the ’60s, then he is old enough to remember when the very NAMES of Hayek, von Mises, and Rothbard were utterly unknown to the general public, and the very word “libertarianism” was a curiosity.

We have come a long way since then and we have a long way to go, but I certainly wouldn’t call libertarianism today a “small, relatively unimportant movement”!

There are six BILLION people in the world. There are some 290 million in USA. A movement that started as a dozen people or so in Ayn Rand’s living room in 1950 is NOT going to (and it probably shouldn’t) sweep the world inside of 50 years. That we started with NO presence in the newsmedia, the Churches, the trade Unions, the Armed Forces, Fortune 500 Companies, Ivy League Universities, the Foreign policy apparatus, or the Federal Courts and Bar Association, that we started from almost NOTHING, and grew to where we are today, should count for something in any fairminded assessment of our movement’s progress.

PEACE AND FREEDOM!!
David K. Meller

Hearing them speak when they speak broadly, it would be easy to think they are all Libertarian. Tax cuts, privatization, “Department Of Defense”. We have been “New Speak”ed into irrelevance in the Big Picture.

So we’re stuck arguing what seems minutia. “No, you’re voting for Social Security.” “No, you’re trying to legislate abortion.” etc.

So if he wants to do some “big picture” stuff, then go right ahead! The problem I’ve found is that when someone says “You’re not looking at the big picture”, they usually don’t then identify either what the “big picture” is or help in any way other than yet more cleaning up of minutia.

Excellent approach! I spent a dozen years in PR and one of the most important things I learned was that people decide issues based on emotion then look for a rationale. But we tend to work with rational exclusively.

Someone said that if you’re not a socialist when you’re young, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 30, you have no head. The reasoning behind this is that young people lack much knowledge and are very emotionally oriented. If we’re going to reach most young people, we have to grab their emotions first.

Socialism is very emotionally oriented, also. To think like a socialist, you have to put your mind in neutral and let you’re emotions flow. The main criticism I get from socialists is that I lack emotions. I think socialists are motivated by a sincere pity for the poor with a mixture of envy and covetousness. We have to address all of these early on when talking to them.

Anyway, where mackey states libertarians focus too much on hot button issues such as drug legalization or prostitution, i agree. The way that works for me is to argue from a moral standpoint (which really gets them off guard) that the freedom of choice is far more just than punishing people for voluntary but “immoral” choices. Also it helps to tell people that there’s a fine line (although not neccesarily mutually exclusive) between justice and personal morality.

There has been a lot of rhetoric, and thought, devoted to this issue, the bulk of which (as Mr. Mackey indicated) has only reached a relatively small audience made up of the easily convertible. The only alternative I can think of to waiting for socialists to “grow out of it” would be to at least try to think like a socialist, and in doing so guess at what motivates good people to become socialistic.

Frank Chodorov had the right idea all along with respect to this issue; it’s a pity that his advice was largely ignored, or avoided. If there’s any “third rail” in libertarianism and libertarian-oriented conservatism, it would be: following Mr. Chodorov’s injunction to immerse yourself in socialism for the purpose of thinking your way out of it.