An old, highschool friend wrote this interesting article. You can find his blog at Capitalism is the Solution.
I'm after a man whom I want to destroy.
He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in.
What man? Robin Hood.
This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness: it is said that he fough agains the looting rulers, and returned the loot to those who had been robbed. But that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived.
He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need; not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor.
He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights; that we don't have to produce, only to want; that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does.
Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and the most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive.
Now ask yourself: has the forcible taking from the productive and giving to the non-productive become the defining characteristic of politicians? Has Robin Hood come to Washington?
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