Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Best Biting Retort of the Day

I've been wanting to do a post on some of the absurd criticisms by the media and those who should know better of opponents to "ObamaCare" but just haven't had enough time.

It's a pretty important issue for everyone around the world given how the US greatly dominates and exports its medical innovation. Beyond this, from a policy standpoint, it's one of those useful things to consider whether not having access to government run healthcare is hindering entrepreneurship and innovation in other industries.

The CEO of Whole Foods proposed an alternative to ObamaCare in the pages of the Wall Street Journal:

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone
Because of his opposition of a tax payer funded and government managed system, there are some who have gone absolutely unhinged and have called on supporters to boycott Whole Foods (maybe they'll go shop for groceries instead at Walmart? - you have to giggle at the irony). I think the best conservative response to the calls to boycott is from Radley Balko at theAgitator (via ClubforGrowth):
Mackey didn’t deliberately offend his customers, as some have suggested. He didn’t spit in your face, or, as one commenter so delicately put it, he didn’t “squeeze a turd in [your] punch bowl.” He just overestimated you.

You see, he shared his ideas on health care reform, thinking that you, being so famously open-minded and all, might take to a few of them, or that it at least might start a conversation. I guess he felt he’d built up some cache with you, and wanted to introduce you to some new ideas. His mistake wasn’t in intentionally offending his customers. He’s a businessman who has built a huge company up from the ground. I’m sure he knows you don’t deliberately offend your customers. His mistake was assuming you all were open-minded enough consider these ideas without taking offense—that you wouldn’t throw a tantrum merely because he suggested some reforms that didn’t fall in direct line with those endorsed by your exalted Democratic leaders in Washington. In retrospect? Yeah, it was a bad move. Turns out that many of you weren’t nearly mature enough to handle it.

Hey, the guy isn’t perfect!

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