John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, has been a one man crusader on behalf of a vibrant and new libertarianism. His debate with Milton Friedman and T.J. Rodgers on the responsibility of business should be a classic, and so should this speech at 2004's FreedomFest. The insight that Mackey has on the libertarian movement is striking. While I do agree that freedom 'from' government is important, he is right to focus also on freedom 'to' take responsibility of our own lives. And in a post-material society, we need to move beyond an emphasis on pure economic self-interest and turn to freedom as a means to self-actualization.

That is the secret of the success of the Left, despite its bankrupt economic philosophy. The Left entices the young with promises of community, love, purpose, peace, health, compassion, caring, and environmental sustainability. The Left's vision of how to meet these higher needs in people is fundamentally flawed. But the idealism and the call to the higher need levels is magnetic and seductive, nonetheless. The irony of the situation, as I see it, is that the Left has idealistic visions of higher human potential and social responsibility but has no effective strategies to realize its vision. The freedom movement has strategies that could meet higher human potential and social responsibility but lacks the idealism and vision to implement these strategies. I assert that the freedom movement can become a successful mass movement today if it will consciously adopt a more idealistic approach to its marketing, branding, and overall vision, and embrace a vision of meeting higher human potentials and greater social responsibility.

The focus on the rest of the speech is how to apply this in four categories: health care, foreign policy, education, and environmentalism. I strongly encourage reading the speech, which highlights some of the flaws of the older libertarian movement and its attachment to profit and greed as the only motivations for freedom.