Robin Hood conversation

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.