Three Cheers for Dolly!

Three Cheers for Dolly! 

By Lawrence W. Reed

Dolly Parton died last week and I’m still not over it. It’s been weighing on me every day since. I loved everything about her—the singer, the songwriter, the musician, the actress, the entrepreneur, the philanthropist, the person—and though I never met her, and I know she made it through the pearly gates, her departure still feels like a punch in the gut.

What a story her extraordinary life was—rags to riches through the sheer force of personality and initiative! Most people can only dream of making the world a better place half as much as she did. She loved God, her family, her fans, and her country. Who in their right mind didn’t love Dolly?!

Just days after she was laid to rest, however, we learned that somebody didn’t like Dolly. Her star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame was vandalized, disfigured by multiple scratches. Until the culprits are apprehended, we can only guess why they would do such a thing. Allow me to speculate in the meantime.

Dolly was best known for her music but I doubt the vandals were protesting that. It’s too easy to express your musical tastes by simply flipping channels or avoiding concerts. No, I suspect the vandals resented Dolly’s success. It would not surprise me one bit if we discover that envy was the problem here, the kind that breeds hatred of “the rich” and a desire many of life’s losers have to punish them. I’ll venture a step further and suggest that the person who scratched Dolly’s star was a socialist.

“Now you’ve gone too far, Mr. Reed,” you might be thinking. “How can you castigate a philosophy or an economic system because of the action of one or two people?” My response: Because this is what socialism teaches and what socialists do. And they admit to it all the time.

Dolly’s net worth in August 2026 was around $650 million, so by that measure she was not a billionaire. But if you add the hundreds of millions she could have kept but gave away for everything from scholarships to children’s books to wildfire relief, she would have been a billionaire. And socialists have been telling us that billionaires are inherently bad. Bernie Sanders used to say the same about millionaires until the unaccomplished wealth-destroyer became one himself by suckering book buyers to buy his bilge in print form.

New York City’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proclaim that “billionaires shouldn’t exist.” They never miss an opportunity to vilify an entire class of people because of their income and then blame them for other people’s problems. It’s an ugly, envy-fueled bigotry that these dumb and privileged demagogues want to foist on society by stealing the wealth of the wealthy and using it to buy votes. What dirty business! What rotten, mean-spirited losers! Like those sidewalk vandals in Hollywood, they deface the achievements of others while racking up few or none of their own.

If it sounds like I’m taking the sins of socialists personally, I’m happy to confess that I am. I don’t look at millionaires and billionaires as one big blob of evil. I judge people for the individuals that they are. And just like poor people, there are both good and bad among the rich. When, in effect, bozos like Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez tell me the Dolly Partons of the world “shouldn’t exist,” I take it as a personal affront. I want them to tell me who Dolly Parton hurt by her success. Why should she have been punished for creating more wealth in a day than the mayor and the congresswoman will likely create in their entire lifetimes?

The world needs more Dolly Partons and fewer socialist politicians. That is a fact beyond reasonable dispute.

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(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.)