Robin hood was also very popular. Rob the rich and give money to the poor. Government guarantees you a job and food. Many people like guaranteed safety net. They do not care to work hard or feel they have no brains to learn a difficult skill. Communism is easy to sell to the masses.
The reason it always fails to create prosperity is it removes incentive to work hard and increase productivity. No use to innovate because there is no reward to reap.
The Robin Hood message is WRONG. He did take from the rich; but the nobles became rich by stealing from the common people. Robin Hood was returning what was rightfully theirs.
Again today, the rich (government) taxes to death the middle class and we need a Robin Hood more than ever.
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