A Facebook friend posted a link to this article. I found the following conversation interesting, so I've recorded it here.
Me: False dichotomy.
Robin Hood both robbed an overreaching government, and stole from the rich to
give to the poor. In his case they happened to be the same. The ultimate lesson
doesn't change either way: allow wealth to become concentrated to the point that
most people have difficulty making ends meet, and law and order breaks down.
Surely nobody can believe that if everyone was starving, but it was because all
the wealth had been acquired by legal monopolies, Robin would have just been
fine with that situation.
(How bad do things
have to be for a criminal to be the hero of the story? I could think of a few
names in the last few years one could say that about, actually...)
Complete equality of
outcome is idiocy, but government can remove all reward for hard work just as
thoroughly by allowing unchecked concentration of wealth as by preventing it
entirely. If you want a functioning market system, and more fundamentally a stable
law abiding society, government is required, and must take a path between the
two absurd extremes typically presented by neoconservative commentators.
Beware those who
present you with such false dichotomies. They're trying to shut down your
reasoning process. Just like sound bite politics.
Friend:
I understand your point. However, in the stories, he didn't steal from
rich individual citizens. He stole from a wealthy government (King) or
Church which came into its wealth by immoral means (robbing from poor
families, unfairly taxing, requiring tithes)
Me: My
point was that difference does not change the applicability of the
story, nor would that difference have changed Robin Hood's actions. My
greater point is that arguing over Robin Hood is a cheap distraction
from the fact that the American lower and middle classes have been
taking a beating for thirty-five years, while the rich get richer and
leave the rest of us with no hope of bettering our situation.
Friend: I
think the two are mutually exclusive. This position assumes all wealthy
individuals achieved this wealth through illegal means, or immoral
means. That simply is not true.
Me: I
make no such assumption. I do assume that having a stable society is
preferable to having an unstable one, and that having a large number of
desperately poor people and a few very rich ones leads to an unstable
society. How those rich people got there is beside the point. You can
argue over a standard of morality all you want, but at the end of the
day you have robbery and food riots either way.
Ultimately,
we're arguing over a marketing slogan, rather than discussing the
actual issues that desperately need to be addressed.
