Small businesses are very often forced to compete with bigger players by exploiting their workers more and make higher margins on the same product/service. That's just how a capitalist ownership structure works out.

I guess it's the deathrattle of the petit-bourgeois that's spinning up these romanticized stories about themselves because they don't want to accept their class is being dissolved and most of them are forced into the possessionless existence of being a worker.

It seems like it's worth mentioning here, that personal rights and small business ("libertarianism", as it's known in America) has been on the right in recent history, but the French revolutionary left held a lot of similar ideas back in the 1700s. It stayed associated with the left wing through the 1800s, before socialist influence on the left pushed it out, as the century ended.

Basically, there tends to be two sides of the political spectrum, but what exactly they are, varies over time and geography.