Entrepreneurs are the heroes, not the villains

John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods has been speaking out against the anti-capitalist and anti-entrepreneurial wave we're seeing in the United States lately:

Capitalism, or I actually prefer, Deirdre McCloskey's word for it "innovationism".

Innovationism is the greatest thing humanity has ever created.

If you go back 200 years ago, when innovationism was really beginning to pick up steam. 94% of everybody alive on Earth lived on less than $2 dollar per day, and that's in today's dollars. Today that's under 10%.

The average lifespan 200 years ago was 30, now it's 72.6. In developed countries, it's closer to 80. Illiteracy rates 200 years ago across the planet were 88%, now they're 12%. If you read Steven Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now", you will see documentation after documentation about how much the world has progressed.

It has been science and technology combined with innovationism as the entrepreneurs took the scientific discoveries and operationalized them to make our lives better. It is the greatest thing humanity has ever done.

(..)

Entrepreneurs are the ones that create great progress but they're universally attacked for the most part. And that's why we're seeing this move towards socialism, because capitalism they see as inherently corrupt. That is wrong. Capitalism is the greatest thing humanity has ever done. We told a bad narrative, and we've let the enemies of capitalism put out a narrative about us that's wrong, inaccurate and it's doing tremendous damage to the minds of young people. We have to counter that.

I agree with this mostly, I do think there's a distinction between "big business" and entrepreneurship. Big business, especially in America, is rife with corruption and lobbying governments to do whatever they want and make society worse. Pure entrepreneurship is beautiful though and an essential force to progress society.

Making entrepreneurs the enemy in your society (like now in America/Europe) only means less entrepreneurship, less progress and entrepreneurs going elsewhere or becoming successful elsewhere (like Asia/Africa).

Full video below, excerpt at @ 42:08:

A better video explaining John Mackey's original take on capitalism and entrepreneurs from a few years ago:

P.S. I wrote a book on building indie startups called MAKE. And I'm on Twitter too if you'd like to follow more of my stories. I don't use email so tweet me your questions. Or you can see my list of posts. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below: