Here’s the lede from an article published by the Washington, DC-based The Hill this morning entitled “Obama plays Robin Hood” (emphasis added):

The White House wants President Obama to play the part of Robin Hood at Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

Obama hopes to use the big speech to remove a blemish of his presidency: an economic recovery that has left wage growth behind.

Free community college. A $175 billion tax cut for the middle class. Faster, cheaper broadband internet. A week of paid sick leave. Discounted mortgages.

Obama wants to move forward with all of these populist proposals for the poor and middle class, and he wants to do so by taking from the rich in the form of higher taxes on the wealthy and Wall Street.

What’s wrong with this framing? Indeed, what’s wrong with the basic idea behind a Robin Hood Tax?

Basically everything is wrong with it, if you understand the Robin Hood story.

Robin Hood did not take from the rich and give to the poor. Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men broke into the government treasury and returned ill-gotten monies to an over-taxed and exploited population. He was not a redistributionist; he was, as my colleague Nathan Griffith says, “a tea partier before tea parties were cool.”

“But George, what about the fact that Obama wants to increase taxes on America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations so that they pay their fair share, and so that he can give a tax cut to over-taxed and exploited lower and middle classes in America?” one might ask.

The literary tradition surrounding this folktale is somewhat opaque and convoluted, saith Wikipedia, but to my knowledge, neither Robin Hood the character nor any of the authors writing about him ever took a position on the concept of a “fair share” of the burden of taxation specifically, or progressive taxation more generally. Further, it’s hard to imagine an instance in which Robin Hood the character would ever support the behavior of Sheriff of Nottingham (who deftly personifies the idea that government, like the mob, is really little more than organized violence).

So it’s not correct to say that President Obama is acting like Robin Hood when he uses his State of the Union address to call for higher taxes on the wealthy for the benefit of a favored political class. (He is, however, using garden-variety 20th century liberal-progressive populist framing by saying “Vote the way I want you to vote, and I’ll take stuff from some people at the barrel of a gun, and use it to help you out” — but calling a communist a communist or a socialist a socialist challenges the orthodoxy in American news rooms today, and risks losing access to the subjects of frequent coverage.)

Here ends the lesson for today.