I know it seems like I keep picking on Elizabeth Warren, I do, but it’s not that I’m just being mean.
It’s just that she keeps saying the most ridiculous things!
She's talking about her 3% wealth tax, and in Bezos’ case, that means seven billion dollars, taken by force, and spent by the government.
She frames it like taking $7 billion from someone is compassionate and like any rich person who doesn’t agree is a bad guy.
That’s a pretty dangerous message to just send out into the world (5.7 million views and counting!) framed as if it’s a perfectly moral proposition. Because it isn’t. It’s objectively immoral.
Of course she also ignores the truth about how we estimate the wealth of multi-billionaires to begin with.
Not an accident, I assure you.
The truth is, taking other people's money (no matter how much they have!) is wrong.
It's wrong when a street criminal does it, and it's just as wrong when the government does it. The badge doesn't change the morality.
Still, Elizabeth and those like her consistently ignore reality and true morality and frame their position as one of moral superiority. They’re the same people who think that Robin Hood is a story about a benevolent socialist robbing the rich and giving to the poor.
It’s something that has always annoyed me.
Somehow, The King of Sherwood was culturally rewritten as a proto-socialist in a green hat, doing by force what the government just hadn't gotten around to doing yet. This is how it gets taught to kids, and I’m willing to bet it’s how Senator Warren would describe it if you asked her.
But that’s not actually how the story goes at all.
(Surprisingly, the 1973 Disney version with the fox gets the moral pretty perfect)
Prince John isn't wealthy because he built something, or created something, or provided something of value that people freely chose to pay for. He's wealthy because he's taxing everyone into the ground. The opening scenes show tax collectors going door to door through Nottingham, emptying the pockets of people who have nothing left. A little rabbit child has one coin—a birthday gift—and the sheriff takes it. A blind beggar gets shaken down on the road. Friar Tuck's poor box gets emptied into the royal coffers.
This is not a story about the rich having too much. It's a story about the state taking what isn't theirs.
And what does Robin Hood actually do? He doesn't find wealthy merchants and relieve them of their earnings. He raids Prince John's castle, takes back the tax revenue and returns it—coin by coin and family by family—to the people it was extracted from in the first place!
What the democratic socialists would frame as redistribution is actually restitution.
There's a massive difference between those two things, and it's exactly the kind of distinction that gets deliberately blurred when this story gets retold through a collectivist lens.
Redistribution says: you have more than someone else, so we'll take from you and give to them.
Restitution says: this was taken from you by force, and here it is back.
Robin Hood is doing the second thing. He's not a socialist. He's a tax protester with exceptional aim.
And while we're at it—when the Sheriff of Nottingham shows up to arrest people for the crime of not having anything left to give, Robin and his band don't exactly comply. They understand something that took legal scholars centuries to formalize: an unjust law has no legitimate claim on a free person. You don't have to follow bad laws just because someone with a badge says so. Jury nullification, civil disobedience, whatever you want to call it, Robin Hood was practicing it in Sherwood Forest long before anyone gave it a name.
Prince John is the one doing redistribution the only way the government can ever do it. By taking from the people, funneling it to the crown to be used and abused, and making everyone materially worse off in the service of consolidating power.
Sound familiar?
It should. Because this is not a fairy tale. This is exactly how government runs today.
We spend a lot of time trying to give kids and parents the lens through which to see, and vocabulary to explain, what's actually happening in the world around them.
The seen and the unseen; the broken window; the creature from Jekyll Island; the messed up market. These aren't abstract ideas; they're the plot of every story ever told about power, those who seek to hold it, and the people who have to live under it.
These ideas show up everywhere once you know how to look for them. In history, in economics, in politics, and, as it turns out, in a 1973 cartoon about a fox in a green hat.
Disney made the villain of a children's movie the most accurate portrayal of government I've ever seen (all the way down to sucking his thumb and throwing tantrums when he doesn’t get his way).
I bet if you make some time to watch it with your kids this week you’ll have a lot to talk about when Prince John starts wailing about “his” taxes.
And speaking of wailing, you might be bummed if you miss your chance to score 20% off our best-selling book bundles. Use code EASTER before midnight tonight to grab them before they’re gone!
— Connor
