“The small businesses we love are struggling to survive” is the conclusion of a new Intentionalist survey of conditions in the greater Seattle area, with two-thirds (!!!) saying that they’re “under more financial stress today than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Well, that’s an unexpected achievement — for certain and entirely ironic values of “unexpected.”
Half of small businesses reported that “public safety issues — such as theft, vandalism, or break-ins — are impacting their operations,” and that recovering to pre-lockdown levels requires “city fee or tax relief.”
Seattle being Seattle, even a report friendly to small business complains that “the emergency-era programs that helped businesses survive have largely ended, even as the need for support remains urgent.”
If you still require COVID support years after the lockdowns ended, the problem isn’t COVID or lockdowns — or support from Washington. The problem lies closer to home.
Like, in City Hall.
Seattle’s new mayor, Katie B. Wilson, sits even further to the left than the last mayor, Bruce Harrell — himself a progressive. A self-described Democratic Socialist, Wilson’s campaign promised aggressive “solutions” to the city’s affordability crisis via progressive taxation that would pay for rent stabilization, expanded public housing, universal childcare, and more mass transit.
Nothing says “affordability” like tax hikes to pay for more big government. All those taxes, regulations, and spending put a real crimp on business activity — perhaps even more than Harrell’s toleration (celebration?) of open-air drug markets, aggressive panhandling, and open rebellions like the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
So, of course, small businesses suffer.
But to progressives, Democratic Socialists, and other lefties, that’s a feature, not a bug.
Left-wing pseudo-documentary filmmaker Michael Moore let the cat out of the bag many years ago, during a press availability following an appearance at my old stomping grounds in Arcata, Calif., deep behind the Redwood Curtain.
This story is so old I have only a cached version of a Free Republic repost of a 2002-ish Arcata Eye story, which, for whatever reason, disappeared from the Eye‘s servers. But here you go:
Asked about Arcata’s pending cap on pattern [ie, franchise] restaurant expansion, Moore – widely recognized as a corporate antagonist – again confounded expectations. “Where will you eat?” he asked. “Can’t you have at least one Jamba Juice?”
Jamba Juice is one of those upscale food chains and has more than 700 locations nationwide. But Moore would rather give his money to a giant corporation than to the Mom & Pop restaurant struggling to survive against them:
You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups. They were the Republicans in the town, they were in the Kiwanas, the Chamber of Commerce – people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store salespersons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. F**k all these small businesses – f**k ’em all! Bring in the chains. The small businesspeople are the rednecks that run the town and suppress the people. F**k ’em all. That’s how I feel.”
Nobody I can think of since Moore has been forthright or foolhardy enough to announce his outright opposition to small business, but you can see it in practice — even in cities like Seattle, where the small business owners likely voted for Wilson.
“If only all of Rome had one neck,” the Emperor Caligula is supposed to have said, so that he could cut it off. But we’ve evolved so much in the last 2,000 years that today’s would-be emperors want one neck to squeeze for cash. And in exchange, big business gets protection in the form of small-business-killing regulations and mandates.
Big Government and Big Business love to get into bed together, and the offspring is always, always, always Authoritarianism. The best the small business owner can hope for is the occasional handout, but if Michael Moore got his way, they wouldn’t even get that.
Recommended: Up in Canada, They’re Signaling Genuine Virtue for Once (Really!)
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