In a review
of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, David Frum
gets a little crunchy and wonders why conservatives haven't
embraced health-increasing foods like those at Whole Foods. After
all, he notes, conservatives have a long history of caring about
public fitness and strength. Furthermore, if conservatives will
defend luxury cars and $20 cigars, why not $4 half-gallons of
organic milk from Whole Foods? In conclusion, the right needs to
embrace policies that promote better public health and fight
obesity. He lists a few regulations and taxes that might serve
this purpose.
It's interesting that he uses the example of Whole Foods.
Although Whole Foods is the very symbol of white, urban, elitist
progressivism, its management has strong pro-free market
sympathies. John Mackey, its CEO, is a professed
libertarian. For a time Whole Foods was a model corporate
citizen, hiring no lobbyists. But after an FTC antitrust lawsuit
in 2007, the company realized that simply in order to compete,
they were going to have to lobby the federal government. As the
Examiner's Tim Carney
documented, they are now allied with other big businesses in
trying to bend the government's interference to their own
advantage.
So Frum's argument is that rich people can afford to buy healthy
food like $4 bottles of Whole Foods milk, and they owe it to the
poor to help them be just as healthy in their diet, using the
government to coerce them. Meanwhile, Whole Foods, like other big
companies, is conspiring how to use the government to prevent
competition and thus is making everyone else, including the poor,
poorer.
It seems like Frum has it backward: wouldn't it be better to make
the poor people richer so they too would want and could afford
the $4 organic milk? And wouldn't one way to make people richer
be to attack the government handouts and regulations favorable to
big businesses like Whole Foods?
