I don’t know Tom Palmer well. We appeared on a radio show together along with Richard Epstein once. He struck me in person, and also by his writings, as a exceedingly bright and charming man and my friends who know him say the same thing about him. Which is why it’s somewhat disappointing, he now says the the title of my book is so “stupid” he hopes I’m “ashamed” to show my face in public. Why? Because he knows the owner of Whole Foods and because the owner of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is a good libertarian, I must be off my rocker.

Right. Palmer is surely smart enough to know that fascism is a more complicated subject than he makes it sound. “I know John Mackey, John Mackey is a friend of mine, and he’s no fascist,” is a pretty vapid argument, to the extent it’s an argument at all. It’s even dumber as a retort to a book Palmer’s never read. Indeed, one gets the sense reading his post or some of my libertarian-reader email, that because Mackey is a libertarian, and perhaps because he’s a libertarian sugar daddy, anything having to do with him, Whole Foods or the organic food fetish is beyond criticism. Palmer might want to read, for starters, the writings of Ludwig Klages, Hitler’s Table Talk, The Nazi War on Cancer or How Green Were the Nazis before he flies off the handle like that. Regardless, let me just say for the record that, unlike Palmer, I do shop at Whole Foods all the time and I think Mackey’s an impressive and admirable businessman. But Palmer, like so many others, has absolutely no idea what I write in my book and, I suspect, there’s remarkably little he would disagree with in it, and a great deal he would applaud. As I’ve intimated many times, I’m much more of a libertarian because I wrote this book. Oh and, I’d be happy to show my face in public, particularly to discuss it with him some time.