Robin Hood

It does not follow that because there are some souls timorous enough to doubt the validity and effectiveness of our ideals and our system, that we must turn to a state controlled or state directed social or economic system in order to cure our troubles.
Herbert Hoover

In popular culture Robin Hood and his band are usually seen as happy highwaymen living a life of leisure in Merrie Olde England’s Sherwood Forest, enjoying the fruits of the land with the assistance of the poor downtrodden serfs, and all the while quite happily driving the gruesome twosome (the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John that is), completely nuts! Robin Hood is best known to our modern era of TV and Hollywood movies for “taking from the rich and giving to the poor”… sort of a tax collector in reverse I guess. Robin Hood is typically seen as a contemporary and supporter of the late-12th century British King Richard the Lionheart, Robin being driven to outlawry during the misrule of Richard's evil brother while the king, returning home from bashing heads at the Third Crusade, was taken captive by the French King and held for ransom. As I remember the story, Prince John and the Sheriff were happily taxing the ever loving daylights out of the population, to pay ransom to the French and hopefully get King Richard back in one piece, or so the story went. Things are sort of foggy as to whether they really wanted the King back or not. I’m quite sure that the gentle reader will make the tenuous connection between mythology and the present day. We to are burdened with outrageously high taxes, along with an unpopular and seemingly unending crusade in the mid-east, while our whole nation seems to be held for ransom by foreign creditors. So, with that I will ask the obvious question… Where is our modern day Robin Hood when we need him?

Taking a leaf from Robin’s book, Franklin D. Roosevelt “defeated” the 1929 economic slump by doing much the same thing, stealing from… err… (Oh Yeah, that’s it, taxing!) Taxing the rich and giving to the poor, thus managing to turn a long and painful recession into a major depression that took nearly ten years and a world war to end. But he did get himself re-elected three more times while “saving us” from the hard times. Today we have President-elect Obama preaching a somewhat similar agenda, that of taxing the rich so that the nation’s wealth can be “redistributed” among the poor and underprivileged. Will it work? Well, we shall see I guess… Roosevelt’s idea was to tax the rich folks and use the money to pay for any number of work projects all around the country, and we did get the Golden Gate Bridge as well as some flood control and hydroelectric dams to show for it. (We also got the TVA which we’re still stuck with.) But most of the work projects were “busy work” that served no real purpose other than to give the impression that folks were working for their paycheck rather than merely being handed a welfare check. (Back in those days, most folks still had some pride.) I don’t know how Obama plans to distribute the redistributed loot today, other than perhaps adding it to the welfare checks.

Nearly every scheme history has cooked up to redistribute the wealth that I’ve ever heard of has ended in failure… often times disastrously so. Mexico, Central America, and some up-and-coming parts of South America used to be owned by a small group of ultra rich families that ran things. Everybody else either worked for those families or pretty well went hungry. Along came a few social reformers who insisted that the system was designed to take care of the rich folks at the expense of the peons (it was), and that it was time to throw a revolution, kick out the Patrons, break up the Estancias, and let everybody in the country own their little piece of land! Viola! Instant civil unrest, major revolutions, and a whole lot of death and destruction. Today most of those countries form a big part of the Third World, are struggling to survive, begging the World Bank for billion dollar loans, and strangely enough are still owned by those ultra rich families. “OH!” the reformer shout, “But the people own the land now! They’re not peons anymore! The wealth was redistributed!” Yup, now they’re landowners well enough, struggling to feed a family on the produce of an acre or so of second rate dirt, paying a crushing tax load imposed by some pretty shady governments, and of course are still supporting the Patrone’s. I seriously question if they’re any better off now than they were, considering just how many of them are busy slipping through our rather leaky southern border each day!

What’s all that got to do with the United States? Well, how much of our nations wealth is controlled by a few somewhat reclusive families in this country? According to a report released by the US Government a couple of years ago, 35% of America’s wealth is controlled by just 1% of our population. They owed 70 percent of bonds, 51 percent of stocks and 62.3 percent of business assets in the country. After the richest one percent, the government found that the next richest nine percent of U.S. families held another 36.1 percent of the countries net worth in 2004, while families in the upper 50 to 90% held only 27.9 percent of our total worth. I gather from all the campaign rhetoric that these are the people whose wealth is supposed to be redistributed by the incoming regime. Somehow I rather doubt it will happen that way. Face it, these folks have been playing “catch me if you can” with the tax collector for generations, they know most of the tricks, and they aren’t going to pay any more than they have to! Nor do I blame then one bit, considering that they’re already paying the lion’s share of the nations annual tax load! By the way, that leading one percent… Those are the folks that pretty well own or control the big banks the taxpayers are currently bailing out.

But now we have our own social reformers shouting “CHANGE”, or so we hear on the evening news, and from the looks of things we’re certainly going to have that! We still have an unpopular war going on in the mid-east, our economy is deep in a meltdown mode, we’re another trillion or so dollars deeper in debt, and despite the temporary lull, petroleum prices are forecast to go through the roof in the not to distant future. Our nations “middle-class” is rapidly going broke, while our poorer folks are rapidly reaching the homeless stage. Our politically correct educational system is more or less useless, and our morality is nearly nonexistent, to the glee of Hollywood, drug dealers, and the ACLU. It’s not all caused by the democrats or republicans either, but rather by the steady, “big government” induced erosion of the thrifty American work ethic we’ve seen ever since socialism got its foot in the door back in 1933. Now we’re going to try even more socialism, to “correct” all the problems… that socialism started in the first place! We don’t need change nearly as much as we need a few words of advice from our nation’s founders, and strangely enough those so badly needed words can be found in our nation’s constitution, and not in the collected works of Frederick Engels and Karl Marx.