David Boaz

Q. What role did formal education play in the success of Chris Haney, the co-creator of the board game Trivial Pursuit, which he and Scott Abbott sold to Hasbro for $80 million? A. Born Aug. 9, 1950, in Welland, Ontario, Mr. Haney often described himself as a beer-swilling high school dropout whose biggest mistake was quitting school at 17. "I should have done it when I was 12," he said in interviews.

What is it with modern American liberals and taxes? Apparently they don't just see taxes as a necessary evil, they actually like 'em; they think, as Gail Collins puts it in the New York Times, that in a better world "little kids would dream of growing up to be really big taxpayers." But you really see liberals' taxophilia coming out when you read the reviews of the new movie Robin Hood, starring Russell Crowe. If liberals don't love taxes, they sure do hate tax protesters. Carlo Rotella, director of American Studies at Boston College, writes in the Boston Globe that this Robin Hood is "A big angry baby [who] fights back against taxes" and that the movie is "hamstrung by a shrill political agenda — endless fake-populist harping on the evils of taxation." You wonder what Professor Rotella teaches his students about America, a country whose fundamental ideology has been described as "antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism." At the Village Voice, Karina Longworth dismisses the movie as "a rousing love letter to the Tea Party movement" in which "Instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about 'liberty' and the rights of the individual as he wanders a countryside populated chiefly by Englishpersons bled dry by government greed." Gotta love those scare quotes around "liberty." Uptown at the New York Times, A. O. Scott is sadly disappointed that "this Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don’t tread on him!" The movie, she laments, is "one big medieval tea party." Moving on down the East Coast establishment, again with the Tea Party hatin' in Michael O'Sullivan's Washington Post review:

Ridley Scott's "Robin Hood" is less about a band of merry men than a whole country of really angry ones. At times, it feels like a political attack ad paid for by the tea party movement, circa 1199. Set in an England that has been bankrupted by years of war in the Middle East -- in this case, the Crusades -- it's the story of a people who are being taxed to death by a corrupt government, under an upstart ruler who's running the country into the ground.

Man, these liberals really don't like Tea Parties, complaints about lost liberty, and Hollywood movies that don't toe the ideological line. As Cathy Young notes at Reason:

Whatever one may think of Scott's newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speak of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the "libertarian rebel" played by Russell Crowe than with the medieval socialist of the "rob from the rich, give to the poor" cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution....The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin's chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs' role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of loathing by peasants and commoners. [In other books and movies] Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit permitted to nobles and strictly forbidden to the lower classes in medieval England; in other words, he is opposing privilege bestowed by political power, not earned wealth.

The reviewers are indeed tapping into a real theme of this Robin Hood, which is a prequel to the usual Robin Hood story; it imagines Robin's life before he went into the forest. Marian tells the sheriff, "You have stripped our wealth to pay for foreign adventures." (A version of the script can be found on Google Books and at Amazon, where Marian is called Marion.)  Robin tells the king the people want a charter to guarantee that every man be "safe from eviction without cause or prison without charge" and free "to work, eat, and live merry as he may on the sweat of his own brow." The evil King John's man Godfrey promises to "have merchants and landowners fill your coffers or their coffins....Loyalty means paying your share in the defense of the realm." And Robin Hood tells the king, in the spirit of Braveheart's William Wallace, "What we ask for is liberty, by law." Dangerous sentiments indeed. You can see what horrifies the liberal reviewers. If this sort of talk catches on, we might become a country based on antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism and governed by a Constitution.