However abstract the Robin Hood myth has become in political terms, to retell it is to embed the central plan of taking from the rich to give to the poor in the specifics of the era when it first emerged, somewhere between the First Crusade and the Black Death, that is, somewhere between the beginning of the 11th century and the middle of the 14th. In the context of high medieval England, the modern right-wing notion of taxation as an oppressive burden on the great mass of people makes sense. The majority of the population were peasants working the land. They were obliged to pay three kinds of tax: one, indirectly, through customs duties and debasement of the coinage, to the king, to finance his wars; another to the church; and a third, the largest, to their feudal landlord. Most peasants were enserfed – that is, bound to the lord in the place where they were born – and paid taxes in kind, in the form of compulsory labour in the lord’s fields, with the family having to surrender their best beast to their lord when the head of the household died. At the same time they were subject to an intense system of local monopolies under the lord’s control – obliged to pay to use the lord’s mill to grind their corn, for instance, or the lord’s ovens to bake their bread – and to a complex web of prohibitions, fees and fines for everything from having a child out of wedlock to killing the lord’s doves. This flow of money, labour and goods from the slave poor to the landholding rich brought nothing to the poor in return except a vague, often broken promise of protection from external violence and the intangible pledge of relief in heaven. The rich were not hardworking; they would have been insulted to be described as such. They con uously spent the taxes they received on themselves: on luxuries, on display, on the aristocratic pastimes of war, poetry, fashion, music, dancing, hunting, romance and fornication. The medieval Robin Hood, then, was not taking from the rich to give to the poor so much as taking
back from the rich to
return to the poor, who would be doing all right if the rich hadn’t been so greedy.
It’s this medieval notion of taxation as robbery from a hardworking peasantry to fund the lifestyle of idle hedonists that maps directly onto the version of the Robin Hood myth that conservative and right-wing populist parties want to promote. This is what Osborne is getting at when he tweets with the hashtag #hardworkingpeople and says: ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’ When he does this he’s positioning himself as Robin Hood; the welfare state and the unemployed as the rapacious Anglo-Norman aristocracy of 13th-century England; and all those who think they pay more in taxes than they get back, be they shift workers or billionaires, as the peasants who feed them. In
Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely Comeback of the American Right, Thomas Frank describes a similar process in America: ‘The conservative renaissance rewrites history according to the political demands of the moment, generates thick smokescreens of deliberate bewilderment, grabs for itself the nobility of the common toiler, and projects onto its rivals the arrogance of the aristocrat.’
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"100% tax" is his typically inane bull , a strawman. USA has never taxed at 100% and nobody is proposing that.
