Obligatory Reading of the Day - Robin Hood

Prince George and the return of the Sheriff of Nottingham
People are working harder, earning less, and the rich are raking it in. Where's Robin Hood when we need him?
By Hal Crowther

There was a time when no one could be elected president of the United States without representing himself as the nemesis of Wall Street and Park Avenue, the champion of the dispossessed and downtrodden. A century ago, this was no perfunctory nod to the bleacher seats. On Labor Day 1906, House Speaker Joe Cannon rallied his Republican troops with a speech praising President Theodore Roosevelt: "He is honest and fearless, and able, and stands for the people every time." At his highest populist pitch, one that rings positively Marxist to our 21st-century ears, Roosevelt sounds like a Robin Hood himself.

"There is not in the world a more ignoble character," Teddy Roosevelt sermonized, "than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses--whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter."

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But I don't know how people think anymore. Another friend, who polls focus groups for political candidates, turned up a college student who will vote Republican because "Republicans are for winners, Democrats are for losers, and I don't want to be a loser."