Dolly Parton Capitalism

Nobody planned Dolly Parton. No committee looked at a poor family with twelve children in Sevier County and decided one of them should become a star. She had a voice and a way with a song, and the rest was people choosing to pay for it: a record, a movie ticket, a day at her park with a funnel cake in one hand. The French have a phrase for leaving that process alone, laissez-faire, let it be, and I'm for it. A person makes something, someone else decides it's worth trading for, and the maker keeps what the trade was worth. Take away the choosing and you lose the making too. Laissez-faire can get a poor girl from Sevier County all the way to a fortune. It has nothing to say about what she does once she's there, and what Dolly did was start mailing books to children she would never meet.

Money, as far as I can tell, is effort that has changed hands. The singer puts it in, the buyer pays for it, and a student pays in a different currency, attention and time. That's why I think knowledge should be free and education should cost. A book can arrive in the mail for nothing. Reading it still costs a child an evening. WTVF NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reports that Dolly's Imagination Library has given away more than 332 million books, and I like to think about that number one kid at a time, every one of them sounding out the words.

I part company with Objectivism reluctantly, because I agree with most of it. It says a producer owes nobody the surplus. I think it stopped one step short. Maslow had people climbing from survival toward the full use of what they've got, and somewhere on that climb another dollar stops doing much for the person holding it. How many cars can one person own? Somebody else could start with that dollar.

Say you earn a hundred dollars and need eighty to live. Ten of what's left goes back into your own work, your schooling and your tools. The other ten goes out to the community, so someone else gets a start. Next payday, same thing. The ten doesn't have to be cash. It can be an afternoon showing a kid how to do something you already know how to do. Dolly does this on a scale I never will, back home in the county she came from. I can still do it at mine.

I don't like being asked for money. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. Years ago I opened a cigar store, and not long after the doors opened a man came by who could use a little help. He offered to clean my windows for five dollars. I told him to clean the windows, straighten up the parking lot and haul off the trash left over from the renovation, and I'd pay him fairly. He did all of it. I gave him a hundred dollars. He asked for five and left with a hundred, and he had earned every one of them. I never saw him again. The store didn't make it to the end of the year. The economy tanked and I couldn't make it pay, so I like to think he came out of that year ahead of me.

You have to eat, and the car won't run on good intentions, so buying things is fine. The trouble starts when nobody knows where enough is, and we don't teach it. We raise consumers. We don't often raise anybody to make something, let alone hand part of it on.

Taxes could do the job, and Denmark and Sweden show a market economy can pay for a decent floor that way. I won't call that wrong. I know what it does to the giving, though. Money taken by law gets paid with a frown, and the person paying never has to think about who's on the other end. Leave the money with the people who earned it and some of them will give, if somebody taught them they owed it.

The market makes the surplus and then walks away from the question of what to do with it. Dolly answered well. That proves she could, and that's all it proves. Nothing makes the next person answer the same way, and I've ruled out everything that might. It's a bet on character. I made it once in a parking lot for a hundred dollars, and I never found out how it came out.

What would improve the odds is teaching. Morals are spiritual, and ethics is plain right and wrong, and you learn both. Teach giving early and long enough and it becomes second nature, the way you hold a door for somebody without deciding to. I can't name the school that teaches it now.

I make music, poems and essays for a reason not far from hers. I want whoever finds them to see they could do the same, if they pay what it costs. I've paid it, and I'm still collecting. One artist reaches a handful of people. A company that lived by the hundred-dollar rule would reach a town, and Dolly's books have reached kids in countries she may never visit, with no law telling her to send them. I don't know where a whole society would end up if it tried this at that size. I do know the market would still be free, effort would still be paid, and the people at the bottom would have a reason to begin. I can't prove giving makes anybody happy. I'm living as if it does, and I'd like to see what happens when other people do too.