In an interview with the Cato Institute, Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey describes business as a “win-win-win game,” rather than the zero-sum game that anti-liberty politicians might make it out to be. When asked by Cato’s Ryan Bourne if not being “afraid of the cut and thrust of capitalist dealmaking” gave him an edge in business, Mackey replies:

I do think we had more of a business perspective on things. Perhaps it was my libertarian beliefs—I just really thought business was a win-win-win game. It was never a zero-sum game in my mind. You’re always trading with your customers and your employees and your suppliers for mutual benefit, mutual gain. That’s the miracle of capitalism. That’s why humanity has been lifted out of the dirt in the last 250 years. The Industrial Revolution led humanity out of this trap that we were in, which really was a zero-sum game.

Later, Bourne asks Mackey about the excitement of running a start-up compared to that of running a major publicly traded company. Mackey responded:

I’d say it’s someplace in between those two extreme states. The start-up period was difficult. We didn’t know what we were doing. The first store—Safer Way, before it was Whole Foods—it struggled. We opened it with $45,000 in capital, and we lost half the money in the first year. Then we opened the first Whole Foods Market. It was hugely successful, but we had a flood nine months after we opened, which bankrupted us, theoretically bankrupt, but we were able to climb out due to the generosity of our customers, all of our stakeholders, customers, employees, suppliers, the bank, investors, who all came through with additional help, additional capital, and additional supplies, which enabled us to skirt that.

Then there was the heady time of initial growth. It’s euphoric, almost, to see that your ideas are working. “My God, this works. We’re making money. We’re growing. This is fun.” And then there was this long period of time after the start-up phase, before we’d been seen as a really big corporation. The media loved us. They love small businesses that are successful and growing. And I think the turning point was 2009 when Obama was elected president. I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that was critical of Obamacare and said free-market solutions were better than what we’re doing. This is taking us down the road to serfdom, as Hayek would say. And that was not well received. Well, it was well received in the Wall Street Journal, and it got a lot of comments, but it really turned the media against Whole Foods Market, turned it against me, and we were no longer this darling. We were now a big corporation making a lot of profit, and therefore we’d gone over to the dark side.

Action Line: Imagine cofounding a successful grocery chain and having the media shun you because you explain in basic terms how a radical new change to America’s health care system won’t work. All these years later, it’s easy to see that many of the suggestions Mackey made in his original op-ed in The Wall Street Journal would have been superior improvements to America’s healthcare system than those that were signed into law. Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.

Watch the entire interview here:

Originally posted on Your Survival Guy.