My syndicated column delves deeper into the Robin Hood Tax being peddled by the Occupiers that I mentioned the other day. Robin Hood vs. the Occupiers by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2011 We have entered a new phase of the endless Occupy Wall Street sleepover. Not working is hard work. After a month of tying up the police, generating mounds of trash, railing against Jews while holding up “Nazi Bankers” signs, grappling with pervs, rapists and thieves in their ranks, communing with avowed communists, and hobnobbing with 1 percenter celebrities donning 99 percenter costumes (phew!), the Occupiers are rallying around a new mascot: Robin Hood. The crime-plagued Carnival of 1,001 Demands is now focused on one unified agenda item: a soak-the-rich tax on financial transactions worldwide. The corporate-bashing Canadian magazine “Adbusters” (funded by left-wing Wall Street trader Robert Halper) initiated the Occupy Wall Street siege last summer and published a new online manifesto this week explaining the call for an October 29 “Robin Hood march”: “Across the globe the 99 percent are marching! … It’s now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful detournements of all kinds.” There’s been no shortage of deviance, unfortunately, what with protesters defecating on police cars, urinating on each other’s tents, stealing food and phones, and exposing themselves to children. But I digress. As the movement “matures,” the leaders overseeing an unruly mob in Guido Fawkes masks exhorted the masses to “occupy the core of our global system.” October 29 is the eve of the G20 Leaders Summit in France, you see, and that’s the date on which Adbusters wants its followers to “rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1 percent ROBIN HOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.” The money, say longtime champions of the tax, would go to “fund crucial action against climate change.” The Occupiers’ message? “We want you to slow down some of that $1.3 trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day — enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world.” Say what? Panicked governments forked over trillions to rescue politically connected, basket-case banks, and the solution is … punishing individual investors, creating less efficient capital markets, and spreading the wealth around to global-warming zealots and welfare-state overlords? Rest assured, the text of the Robin Hood tax manifesto will be chanted in ignorant zombie unison — using the “human microphone” method of call and drone — in dingy occupier camps from NYC to San Francisco and every blue dot in between. Showcasing their economic illiteracy, the Occupiers remain clueless about the real-world consequences of their redistributionist claptrap. And they’re ridiculously oblivious to the irony of adopting anti-tax crusader “Robin Hood” as their hero. The ostensible intent of the anti-”greed” mob may be to reduce volatility in the market by punishing rapacious “banksters.” But the ultimate outcome would be less economic growth, bigger government and more punitive costs imposed on the decidedly non-rich. A European Union commission report on the impact of such a tax shows that it would reduce GDP by 0.5 percent. U.S. economist Kenneth Rogoff explained further in a recent analysis that “the declining volume of trades would shrink the tax base precipitously. As a result, the ultimate revenue gains are likely to prove disappointing, as Sweden discovered when it attempted to tax financial transactions two decades ago.” The Association for Financial Markets in Europe found that 60 percent of trading volume in Sweden escaped to London after Sweden temporarily raised equity tax rates in the 1980s, and that the country experienced an 85 percent drop in bond trading volume, according to Financial News. The outcome was not simply less volatile trading. It was less trading, period. The demon millionaires and billionaires whom the Occupiers seek to punish would not be the only ones to bear the costs. Over time, the burden of the Robin Hood tax would shift. Rogoff observed: “Higher transactions taxes increase the cost of capital, ultimately lowering investment. With a lower capital stock, output would trend downward, reducing government revenues and substantially offsetting the direct gain from the tax. In the long run, wages would fall, and ordinary workers would end up bearing a significant share of the cost.” The original Robin Hood tales of the Middle Ages celebrated a renegade who rose up against property rights violations and taxation abuses. His archenemies were not private traders or bankers, but the local government tax collector, the Sheriff of Nottingham and the power-grabbing ruler, Prince John. Robin Hood, in other words, was far more tea party than flea party. In any case, if the Occupiers insist on celebrating outright theft from the haves in the name of the have-nots, perhaps they should stop complaining about the pickpockets and looters infesting their camps. Live by “social justice” nursery rhymes. Die by “social justice” crimes.
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Robin Hood vs. the Occupiers
We have entered a new phase of the endless Occupy Wall Street sleepover. After a month of provoking the police, generating mounds of trash, begging for free WiFi, port-o-potties, and food, teaching each other Kamp Alinsky hand signals, railing against Jews while holding up “Nazi Bankers” signs, grappling with pervs and rapists and thieves in their ranks, and hobnobbing with 1 percent-er celebrities donning 99 percent-er costumes, the Occupiers are rallying around a new mascot: Robin Hood. From the Canadian magazine “ Adbusters ” that helped launch the protests comes a call for an October 29 “Robin Hood soak-the-rich tax” parade: Alright you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there, We’re living through a magical moment … #OCCUPYWALLSTREET has catalyzed into an international insurgency for democracy … the mood at our assemblies is electric … people who go there are drawn into a Gandhian spirit of camaraderie and hope for a new kind of future. Across the globe the 99% are marching! You have inspired more than you know. People are digging into Act One of the long Spring. Its now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful détournements of all kinds. Open your insurrectionary imagination. Anything, from a bottom-up transformation of the global economy to changing the way we eat, the way we get around, the way we live, love and communicate … be the spark that sustains a global revolution of everyday life! As the movement matures, lets consider a response to our critics. Lets occupy the core of our global system. Lets dethrone the greed that defines this new century. Lets work to define our one great demand. OCTOBER 29 – #ROBINHOOD GLOBAL MARCH This is a proposal for the general assemblies of the Occupy movement. Eight years ago, on February 15, 2003, upwards of 15 million people in sixty countries marched together to stop President Bush from invading Iraq … a huge chunk of humanity lived for one day without dead time and glimpsed the power of a united people’s movement. Now we have an opportunity to repeat that performance on an even larger scale. On October 29, on the eve of the G20 Leaders Summit in France, let’s the people of the world rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1% #ROBINHOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades. Let’s send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3-trillion easy money that’s sloshing around the global casino each day – enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world. Take this idea to your local general assembly and join your comrades in the streets on October 29. Rest assured, the text of this manifesto will be chanted in that zombie human mic way in dingy occupier camps from NYC to San Francisco to every blue dot in between. As for coopting Robin Hood, I remind you of how the progs have his legacy upside down. Flashbook – Andrew Busch 2002: Of course, liberals prefer to see themselves as moral descendents of Robin Hood, rather than intellectual heirs of Hooverism. Democrats are frequently heard making the Robin Hood analogy in reverse, claiming that the Bush administration’s budget, including tax cuts and social spending restraint, would take from the poor and give to the rich. Leaving aside the detail that a tax cut allowing someone to keep more of his earnings is not “giving” him anything that is not already his, the adoption of Robin Hood as the patron saint of liberalism cries out for correction. To the contrary, it is conservatives who should extol Mr. Hood as one of their own. All one has to do is to consult the Disney films’ animated version of Robin Hood—as I did with my two small children last weekend—to find at least four reasons why one would not find Robin Hood voting for Al Gore or John Kerry if his feathered hat depended on it. 1. As one wag perceptively pointed out some time ago, Robin Hood’s claim to fame was not that he took from the rich to give to the poor, but that he took from the tax collector and gave back to the people their own money. The central issue was overtaxation, and Robin Hood was most emphatically not on the side of the bureaucracy. The ultimate bad guy was Prince John, the very caricature of greedy, arrogant government; the proximate bad guy was the Sheriff of Nottingham, the ruthless enforcer whose audit strategy was even more intimidating than that of the IRS. The victims were the taxpayers whose property was confiscated to feed John’s insatiable lust for higher revenues. As Robin Hood speeds to its exciting conclusion, Friar Tuck adopts as his battle cry, “Praise the Lord and pass the tax rebate!” 2. Robin Hood was waging a struggle not only against overtaxation but against illegitimate, unconstitutional government. As the characters ridicule “Prince John, the phony king of England,” they are staking their fight on the view that John has overstepped his legal and constitutional bounds. He had, in other words, gone beyond the exercise of powers rightfully his. Unimpressed with Prince John’s living constitution, which bore a disturbing resemblance to a regime of raw, unconstrained power, Robin Hood and his merry band seem to prefer a stricter construction. 3. At the same time, they are emboldened to resist John’s usurpation by a sense that acts of government must be tested not only against the written law but against natural law. John has violated not only the law of England, he has waged war against the law of God. The disrespect held by John and his minions for the law of God—or, to put it another way, their attempt to elevate his rule above any sort of limit, human or divine—is epitomized when the Sheriff of Nottingham robs even Friar Tuck’s church to pad the revenues. The idea of natural law can, of course, be put to a variety of uses, not all of which conservatives find agreeable, but one of the most distinct features of the modern left is a moral nihilism which denies the possibility of higher objective truth, and consequently denies the possibility of inherent limits on the ambitions of the state. To the extent that Robin Hood sought to hold John’s regime to an unwritten standard of limitation and accountability, modern liberals can hardly claim him as one of their own… “Praise the Lord and pass the tax rebate!” Can’t wait to see that on some giant banners at the Occupiers Oct. 29 event: *** Since they are such champions of robbing from the rich and redistributing to the poor, all those Occupier robbery victims in Zuccotti Park should stop complaining, yes?
Originally posted here:
Occupiers’ new mascot: Anti-tax crusader Robin Hood
Throughout the ages, Robin Hood has carried a very positive image: a dashing hero who steals from a corrupt kingdom and distributes the loot to the poor.
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What Kind of a Country Do You Want?
Democrats say it is critical that they turn out African American voters this November. But for Robin Carnahan, the party’s nominee for Senate in Missouri, that is proving to be tricky.
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Democrats Conflicted on Black Vote, Obama
St. Louis's alternative weekly paper notices that Nate Silver puts Missouri Democrat Robin Carnahan's chances of winning her Senate race at . . . 9 percent. I guess you could say his assessment is Blunt . Jim Geraghty
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Silver Sees a Sliver of a Chance for Carnahan
I hear Joe Biden is doing a fundraiser for Missouri Senate candidate Robin Carnahan on October 7. Perhaps this is a make-up for the last time he was in the state and didn't mention her , and she didn't show up for his event. Jim Geraghty
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Aww. It Looks Like Biden and Carnahan Are Reconciling.
