Robin Hood Was A Supply-Sider

We are all familiar with the story of Robin Hood, tales that have survived from as far back as the Fourteenth Century and immortalized today in film, over, and over, and over again, sometimes rather badly.

But the story, as we so often understand it today, is all wrong. Robin Hood was a Supply-Side Economist!

The Legend of Robin Hood has been usurped by the left, misunderstood for it's message. Robin Hood "Took from the Rich and gave to the Poor." This, we have come to believe means that in a world where the rich are constantly gaining their wealth at the expense of the little guy, a hero such as Robin Hood is needed to right this injustice.

In today's society, the rich are wealthy businessmen and corporation executives who "the poor" see as having received their ill-gotten gains on the backs of the working class.

But an examination of Merry Old England at the time, paints an entirely different story, once we examine the tale. Who were the rich at that time? Simply put -- they were the government. The government of the time was made up of landed noblemen, who produced nothing. They owned the very land on which the people lived; for the common people there was almost no concept of personal property; and the nobility systematically taxed the people into poverty.

Onerous and punitively high taxes provented a small and struggling middle class from achieving any power, while preventing most of the citizenry from ever advancing beyond the station of serf. It was government that Robin Hood was fighting.

When Robin Hood "stole from the rich" what he was actually doing was re-distributing the taxes collected by the government back to the people who had earned them in the first place, allowing the people to spend their own money to advance what little economy they had at the time.

If you examine the Robin Hood legend properly, you see that the economy was stagnant, with virtually no growth. Because of a punitive tax structure the people had little reason to work hard to succeed (the government was going to take it anyways), no incentive to innovate and anple reason to search for and use tax shelters. High punitive taxes caused people to hide their productive efforts from the tax collectors, thereby making them criminals to the government.

This misunderstanding of the Robin Hood tale has been pernicious throughout the last century, as people have come to believe that to become rich is evil, even as they attempt, through the Capitalist system to achieve that threshold. The philosophy thus captured by popular understanding is that Robin Hood is a hero to the common people because even though he came from a wealthy background, he chose to live in the forest as an outlaw, and take back what belonged to the people, eschewing the evil rich.

As I pointed out above, the popular understanding is partially right -- he is a hero to the common man, but it was then, as is so often the case today, the government that is the burden on the people, preventing them from achieving their best.

Even Ayn Rand in her magnificent work Atlas Shrugged** failed to understand the real meaning behind the Robin Hood myth, as the character John Gault called for the eradication of Robin Hood as a hero figure. In her estimation, Robin Hood was the typical anti-Capitalist hero, stealing from the producers to give to the non-producers.

In this, I would point out that Rand has it exactly backwards. Robin Hood was John Gault, taking back from an undeserving and currupt government that which the producers had made, and giving it back to those producers to generate their own economy and create their own wealth.

When viewed in his proper role as a smaller-government, less taxation proponent, Robin Hood should take his rightful place among the great Supply-Side Economists of all time. I can hardly wait for the Hollywood film that makes that point for the viewer.

**Yes, I said magnificent. I said it and I meant it. Sure it is a tome of more than 1000 pages, sometimes pedantic and slow, but it is a magnificent piece of work just the same. A wonderful combination of Libertarian philosophy, social commentary of the time, and even science fiction, it deserves its place with all-time great literature.