Robin Hood [was: You are being lied to about pirates - by Johann Hari]

Dear Chirs;

For a different take on Robin Hood try this one from Ayn Rand's - Atlas Shrugged - which I am reasonably certain you must have read if not here's a small snippet from it and it turns Robin Hood into Robbing Hood in Ayn Rand's eyes.

There is a whole lot more like that in Atlas Shrugged in the battle between the Looters and Moochers vs. the Producers and Strikers.

Who's John Galt???

Ron Getty - SF Libertarian
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Robin Hood is Evil
Ragnar Danneskjold: "But I’ve chosen a special mission of my own. 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."

Hank Rearden: "What man?"

Ragnar: "Robin Hood."

Ragnar: ". . . [Robin Hood] is not remembered 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 the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became a 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. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures – the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich – whom
men have come to regard as the moral idea." ". . . Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting, Mr. Rearden. 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."

The Pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld
From Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

There's a passage though which you omitted, in Atlas Shrugged, where someone says: 'Of course, Robin Hood stole from the thieving rich and gave to the deserving poor; but that's not the construction they put on the story'.

The theiving rich are the corporate looters and corrupt politicians of era just like in Robin Hood's time.