Whole Foods CEO Editorializes: People Don’t Have A Right To Health Care, Food or Shelter

Written by Bill World News Sep 29, 2009

Revolution Newspaper mentions this snippet: “In the health care debate, John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) raised up a storm among liberals last week with his op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal. Among Mackey’s cold-blooded comments, he pointed out:

“Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This ‘right’ has never existed in America.”

This begs the question if the Constitution can not guarantee the right to have shelter, to eat or get treated with medicine, then what the fuck good is it?! This subject exposes the US Constitution as an exploiter’s view of freedom, designed from the top down. The World has a better document to work by, ‘The Communist Manifesto’:

“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the
products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the
power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such
appropriation.”

Or compare the CEO’s outlook with that of modern Communist thought:

“[Bob]Avakian [Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA] shows how the sights and aspirations of people today, the world over, are funneled and hemmed into looking at things in terms which do not go beyond the outlook and values which capitalism engenders and thrives upon, and the social relations in which those ideas are rooted. Today these are deemed to be the result of “human nature.” But another, radically different world is possible, with a different and far more liberating conception of rights and freedom. Avakian paints a compelling picture of a world where people would have the right not to confront each other in antagonistic relations…where there would be the right to eat for every human being—and no one would be worked to death for the profit of others, but people would work cooperatively to meet the needs of all…where all of humanity would have the right to engage in the arts, or in science and in other intellectual thought, and where the research and discovery in medicine and science that today is subordinated to the economic, political, and ideological demands of capital would be emancipated from that. A communist world where people are no longer constrained by the narrow horizons which are the product of and demanded by capitalism.”

http://revcom.us/quick/128en.htm#a1

What the world needs is the basis of Marxism: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” This is the exact opposite of what Capitalism produces.

You can read the Whole Foods (I call it Whole Paycheck) Corporate Executive John Mackey’s op-ed piece, ‘The Whole Foods alternative to Obama Care: Eight Things We Can Do to Improve Health Care Without Adding to the Deficit.’ In the August 11th, 2009 Wall Street Journal by clicking on this link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html

pf button both Whole Foods CEO Editorializes: People Dont Have A Right To Health Care, Food or Shelter

JFoster

Bill, I know this will shock you, but COMMUNISM IS DEAD. It’s gone from Russia, gone from China, gone from Vietnam. The last bastion of true Communism left is Cuba, where the majority of the population lives malnourished in poverty.

In contrast, the greatest sociopolitical advance of the last 2,000 years was conceived not by Marx but rather by Jefferson: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. The foundation of a constitutional republic (and yes, capitalism as well) is this principal that we are CREATED equal and have the EQUAL rights to pursue as good a life as possible that does not impinge on the rights of others.

Note that there is no right to eat, nor a right to health care, nor a right to shelter, etc. Why? Because these are NOT RIGHTS…the provision of such things REQUIRES effort on the part of another…and thereby impinges on the rights of others. Such things, by definition are NOT rights, and no matter how much you would like to have a Utopian world in which everyone has ample food, shelter, and medical care, such a Utopia does not exist.

You DO NOT have a right to health care. If our government provides you with such care and requires me to pay for it, I will have to do so by reducing the workforce at my business and reducing my charitable donations. Society loses in this case.

The greatest innovations and social advances in Human history have emerged from capitalism. It is far from a perfect socioeconomic system. But it’s a heck of a lot better than Communism or Utopian fantasies.
Bill

Where do rights come from JFoster? There are bourgeois (the propertied class) ideas concerning rights and there are proletarian (working people’s) ideas. Rights to get things done that need to be accomplished; the freedom to cooperatively get done what needs to be done is proletariat freedom. The bourgeois ‘freedom’ is to use people and exploit labor so that the propertied class can make a profit.

There are two very fundamentally opposed views of freedom. Positive freedom is the concept that associates freedom to bring about a positive change to achieve an objective. Negative freedom means I can do what ever I want so long as it doesn’t “interfere with the rights” of others. This concept lies at the heart of Liberal Democratic politics. But this idea was promoted by rich people whose economy was dependent on slavery. The USA as we know it couldn’t have been built without slavery. Things were relatively free for the rich, propertied class—a limited freedom revolving around not ding physical harm (to others of their class) and around bourgeois property rights. The better Freedom is to do what needs to be done to achieve a goal or straighten out some wrong shit. The bourgeois class is talking about freedom to exploit; the proletariat is talking about how to get things done cooperatively. What the Capitalist rulers were promoting as universal human values, are not universal but in the interests of their class. “People are all born free.” –well, not in the real world. There is a social and historical context to the proclamations of principles in the Constitution. You can’t just proclaim that everyone is born free. Life is not some sort of essence separate from material reality. Truth be told some are born freer than others. Being born a slave is not the same as being born a master. It takes an enormous fight to get free.

The original phrase by the slave owners who wrote the constitution was ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of property, (not the pursuit of ‘happiness’) It was very much in the Capitalist founder’s minds that an important form of property was human beings. After the Civil War chattel slavery was replaced by wage slavery. Communism seeks to abolish all forms of slavery.

We do have the historic examples of Socialism—as a transitionary stage to Communism– in Russia and China (when it was Maoist) where adequate food, shelter, and medicine was provided as a right. The sincere goal of Communism: to overcome all class distinctions and all systems and relations of exploitation, all oppressive social institutions and relations of social inequality –like racial discrimination and the domination of women by men –ended, and all oppressive and backwards ideas and values that flow from the oppressive relations cast off. Imagine a society where people consciously learn about and transform the world, where people are no longer imprisoned by the chains of tradition or ignorance, where people together debate and decide how to develop society, where people no longer wonder where their next meal will come from, where people not only cooperatively work to produce the necessities of life, but get into art and culture and science, where people have a sense of ease, because work is guaranteed and it’s difficult to get fired from your job, and where people interact with each other based on mutual respect, concern, and love for humanity.

I’m not trying to paint these two revolutions as Utopia or a fantastic Shangri-la. There were problems and errors, and examples of unfair treatment, but we should and can learn how to do better in the next round of Socialist revolutions. The great majority of the world’s people still desperately need radical change. Capitalism is a fetter in the way of most people getting what they need.

“We ought to be fed up by now. Turn the system upside down.” –The Coup, Party Music album
http://talesofburning.thebsblogger.com/ Tricia Alhambra

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