By Tribune-Review

Published: Saturday, January 19, 2013, 9:00 p.m.
Updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Our heartiest congratulations to John Mackey, CEO of the wildly popular Whole Foods supermarket chain. For last week, he had the courage (and on NPR, no less) to call out ObamaCare for what it is — economic “fascism.”

The “civil discourse” crowd, of course, is up in arms. After all, for knee-jerk “progressives,” labeling something (or someone) as “fascist” is one of the nastiest political epithets one can “name-call.” But even elementary students of history and economics know better.

As Sheldon Richman reminds in the Library of Economics and Liberty, “As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. For those with the hubris to think they, not free markets, could better serve society, ‘fascism' (or as we prefer, “fascistic economics”) was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone (classic) liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism.”

The general parallels to Obamanomics are glaring. Throw in the specifics of ObamaCare — then consider forays into national industrial policy and state protection of organized labor cartels — and the parallels are blinding.

Simply put, fascistic economics “denatures” the marketplace, eventually destroying it, and all in warped servitude to “the state.”

Whole Foods' John Mackey will take his lumps from the “progressive” ignorami. (Later he even expressed regret for using a word considered to be taboo.) But he is to be lauded for speaking truth to economic fascism.

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