The left attacks Dolly Parton for her Super Bowl ad promoting small business

How is this for obnoxious?

Leftists, one after another, have put a target on country music legend Dolly Parton's back.  Her crime against political correctness?  Making a Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, an inexpensive website-creating framework for small and start-up businesses.

Here's what enraged them:

"As much as we all love Dolly Parton, it's still disappointing to hear her literally sing the praises of 'working, working, working,'" thundered a columnist printed at NBC News.

'One job is no longer enough to survive': Dolly Parton's Super Bowl ad glosses over the reality for millions of gig workers, critics say, read the headline at MarketWatch.

A Newsweek columnist began like this

Amid stagnant wages, dwindling retirement savings, skyrocketing health insurance bills, and ever-higher rents, Big Business finally has a way to fix the Dickensian economy.

No, it isn't higher wages, Medicare for All, the promised $2,000 check, or even a whittled-down $1,000 check. Instead, this Super Bowl Sunday, the nation will be told that the long-sought answer is the Great American Side Hustle — the mythical 1099 talisman that will supposedly liberate us from the economic hardship of the low-paying day job.

So Parton, whose own history as an enterprising country music singer, who gained control of her own musical work product over the big boys as a scrappy, freelance artist, which is what the NBC News piece described, is somehow "bad" for advocating small business entrepreneurship, same as what she herself did to get herself rich and famous.  Parton's ad features at least three people happily pursuing their passions as side hustles — a gardener, a fitness trainer, and an artist.  Nobody handed Parton her fame and fortune on a plate; she came from the poorest of the poor in fact, as she wended her way, with hard work, stable family, talent, and luck as a small-time singer all the way to the top.  Yet here we are, now seeing the press condemning such individual initiative.

The reason all three of them call it "bad" is that entrepreneurship, which often starts as a side hustle, is hard and speculative and always involves working overtime.  It's hard work to succeed as a new business, so the message now is that no one should do it.

Tell that to generations of immigrants from every country who began with side hustles and small businesses, people who began their route to success through laundry services, gardening contracts, bodegas, donut shops, cleaning contracts, food trucks, taco stands.  Tell that to best-selling author Rob Kiyosaki, whose "Rich Dad" series of how-to-get-rich books fundamentally argues that if you want to get rich, your best shot is to own your own company, which is how some people start out with rich dads.  Recall the story of the daughter of the In-N-Out founder, who was made fun by her classmates at school because they learned her father ran burger joints...and when she grew up, inherited a billion.

Starting a small business, which is hard as hell, is normally the surest road to fortune if the speculative effort succeeds, which, in a capitalist economy, is not guaranteed.  Nevertheless, with hard work, in America, at least, it often does.

Has it come to this in the era of Joe Biden?  That anyone who seeks to increase their income through a small business with an inexpensive website, is the bad guy, someone who advocates exploiting themselves as workers, instead of, as some advocate, the $15-an-hour minimum wage? 

Rest assured that if Democrats get their way on the $15-an-hour minimum wage, there will be side hustles, given the millions who will be thrown out of work.

And what exactly are they advocating for?  The abolition of small and start-up business?  We saw how that went with the COVID lockdowns so enthusiastically promoted by the left.  In some lockdown-ravaged places such as New York, as many as a third of restaurants have closed down.  Now for leftists to be blasting a company and a singer for promoting small business suggests a pretty significant new front in the war on small business.

This, by the way, is the lifeblood of America.  And economists measure economic health in the U.S. through the number of newly formed small businesses.  In the Obama era, they went dormant.  In the Trump era, they came back to life.

Yet without them, there would be no innovation and no progress, and no real America.

The argument comes on top of other arguments against them, one of which is about the minimum wage.  Nominally, they claim that a minimum wage of $15 an hour should make everyone happy as a substitute for business ownership and control, so all the proles out there should sit down and shut up, with nobody dreaming of making more.  Big unions will be the substitute, and workers losing their voices and ideas under unions and making only what the unions say they can make is to them the ideal.  Proles are to remain proles forever with zero upward mobility, just as Marx intended.

They also favor a big-regulation state that burdens small business and hampers startups.  Bureaucrats will keep small businesses from forming, and that suits the left as much as $15-an-hour layoffs.

Nobody has to start a small business, so to be attacking Parton for doing an ad for those who want to is outrageous.

It's the agenda of the left to destroy small business as the fount of American dynamism: lockdowns, it seems, for small businesses but not the big boys were not enough.  Wages should be so high that only big corporates and government can hire.  Now the snowflake argument is that entrepreneurship is just too hard.

See the pattern.  One can only hope Dolly Parton ignores the vicious agenda behind this and doubles down to encourage all those with initiative.

Image credit: Picryl, public domain.

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