Boycott's contribution

Paul Jacob:

Boycotts are as American as apple pie . . . with whole wheat crust.

Granted, the term boycott comes from Charles C. Boycott, an English land agent who got in a fracas with Irish tenant farmers over rents in 1880. Laborers refused to harvest Boycott's potatoes. Shopkeepers in the towns wouldn't trade with him. Even the postman declined to deliver his mail.

To bring people in to harvest the potatoes cost the British government, Boycott, and others over £10,000 — for spuds worth £350. In December of that year, Boycott left the Emerald Isle.

So, apparently, 100 years earlier, when American colonists boycotted English tea and other items in protest of British policies — most importantly, direct taxation without colonial representation — they must have called it something else altogether.

But whatever the name, it worked. The world's freest republic — ours — was fertilized through boycotts. And nearly two-hundred years later, the boycott proved instrumental in winning equal rights for black Americans.

Today, I won't buy gas at CITGO. A couple years back, a neighbor passed the station to pay a penny more a gallon somewhere else. When I asked why, she said she didn't want to fund Hugo Chavez. CITGO is a Venezuelan state-owned company. I was an easy convert. And we must not have been alone: The local 7-11 recently posted signs telling customers that their gasoline is no longer obtained from CITGO.

Boycotts are cool. As I've often told subscribers to my Common Sense e-letter, the impact of our financial decisions — even from us poor folks — is, for better or worse, usually greater than that of our votes.

But certainly not all boycotts make sense. Too often, they oppose common sense.

Ten days ago, John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods — a grocery chain self-dubbed as "selling the highest quality natural and organic products" — made the miscalculation of embracing President Barack Obama's call for more ideas on how to fix our medical care and health insurance systems. Mackey wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal offering eight specific solutions that could be implemented at little or no cost to taxpayers.

Mackey's proposals are geared toward creating a freer and more competitive marketplace for medical services — without a massive and (let's admit it) costly expansion of government involvement. Paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher (no doubt his first sin), Mackey wrote: "[W]e are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us."

Then, he offered some simple steps in the direction of permitting a marketplace in health care: (1) remove obstacles to Health Savings Accounts, (2) allow individuals the same tax-deductibility as businesses on medical insurance, (3) allow insurance companies to compete across state lines, (4) repeal government mandates on what ailments insurance companies must cover, (5) pass tort reform, (6) require transparency on medical bills, (7) enact Medicare reform (since it is headed for bankruptcy), and (8) permit citizens to donate money on their tax form to provide medical coverage for those less fortunate.

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I was not aware of the origins of the word, so Jacob's piece was worthwhile just for that factoid. But, his point about Whole Food is valid. What I find strange about the people angry with Mackey is that he has developed a business model that works for his employees and provides them with adequate health care. Why do liberals object to that?

The fact that he suggest that other adopt this model seems generous to me, but to the liberals they see it as undercutting the Democrats' proposals rather than guiding them in a better direction. What that suggest to me is that they are pushing an agenda about ideology and not about providing affordable health care.