Commentary

Robin Hood in Reverse: When Washington Became the King

Robin Hood stole from the King because the King had taken too much from the people. Trump’s argument begins with a more unsettling proposition: Washington forgot it was never the King.

By Michael T. Ruhlman | BYWSJ.com

For generations, the legend of Robin Hood has survived because beneath the bows, arrows, Sherwood Forest and colorful characters lies a remarkably durable political idea: there is a point at which taxation stops feeling like the legitimate financing of government and starts feeling like tribute.

Robin Hood’s enemy was not wealth itself. In the popular telling, his enemy was concentrated power — the Sheriff, the Crown and a system capable of taking from ordinary people while leaving them little ability to resist. The gold accumulated in the King’s coffers. Robin Hood took it back.

More than seven centuries later, America is confronting a strangely inverted version of the same argument. There is no Nottingham Castle. There is Washington. There is no Sheriff collecting sacks of coins. There is an extraordinarily sophisticated federal government capable of collecting taxes, imposing tariffs, borrowing trillions of dollars and distributing enormous sums through an administrative system few citizens could possibly understand in its entirety.

And now Donald Trump has revived one of the oldest political questions imaginable: Whose money is it?

The Treasury Is Not the King’s Treasure

The distinction matters. A monarchy traditionally begins with sovereignty flowing downward from the Crown. The American experiment begins with sovereignty flowing upward from the people. That changes everything.

The federal government does not create the productive capacity of the American people. Farmers grow. Workers build. Entrepreneurs risk. Companies manufacture. Investors provide capital. Families save. Consumers purchase. Government taxes portions of that activity to perform the responsibilities assigned to it.

That may sound like semantics. It isn’t. The moment government begins thinking of tax revenue as its money, rather than money entrusted to it for public purposes, the relationship between citizen and state begins to change. The taxpayer slowly stops looking like the owner and starts looking like the subject. And Washington begins looking remarkably like the castle on the hill.

Enter Trump

This is where Trump’s political instinct becomes interesting. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump — and Americans disagree passionately about him — he has an unusual ability to reduce complicated economic arguments to questions of ownership.

His argument is not simply that government should give people money. That is ordinary redistribution politics. The more provocative argument is that government should give people back their money. Those are entirely different propositions.

Traditional redistribution begins with government collecting resources and deciding who should receive them. The taxpayer-dividend concept begins from another premise: the citizen had the first claim. If Washington collects extraordinary revenues, eliminates waste, reduces unnecessary spending or otherwise produces savings, why shouldn’t some portion of those benefits flow back to the people financing the enterprise?

That sounds less like welfare and more like a dividend. And suddenly Robin Hood reappears in Sherwood Forest — except this time he isn’t stealing from the King’s treasury. He is standing outside Washington asking whether the treasury ever belonged to the King in the first place.

But There Is a Problem

There is an enormous weakness in the analogy, and intellectually serious people shouldn’t ignore it. America is deeply in debt. The federal government routinely spends more than it collects. Washington isn’t sitting on a gigantic chest of surplus gold waiting to be returned to its rightful owners. Much of the money being spent today is borrowed.

That creates a legitimate objection to any proposal described as “giving money back.” How do you return a surplus when you’re running a deficit? If government collects an additional dollar while simultaneously borrowing another, deciding whether that first dollar is “extra money” becomes considerably more complicated.

Critics therefore have a powerful argument: pay down the debt, reduce the deficit, and stop borrowing against the future earnings of children who aren’t old enough to vote. That argument deserves to be heard.

But it also exposes something much larger. If Washington cannot afford to return money to taxpayers because it is already trillions of dollars in debt, perhaps the real scandal isn’t the proposed refund. Perhaps the scandal is the size of Washington.

The Modern King Doesn’t Wear a Crown

Modern governments rarely become powerful because somebody wakes up one morning and declares himself King. Power accumulates gradually. A program here. An agency there. A temporary emergency expenditure that somehow becomes permanent. A regulation, a subsidy, a tax provision. Another department, another appropriation, another trillion dollars.

Each may have had a defensible purpose when created. But institutions have a remarkable instinct for survival, and eventually citizens discover they have constructed something no single election can easily dismantle. The castle built itself one brick at a time — and nobody noticed the crown appearing on Washington’s head.

Taxation and the American Compact

Taxes themselves are not tyranny. No serious society can function without common obligations. Americans expect national defense, courts, infrastructure, law enforcement, disaster response, border protection and countless other public functions. Those things cost money.

The real question isn’t whether citizens should contribute. It is where contribution ends and governmental entitlement begins. There is an enormous philosophical difference between two statements:

One describes representative government. The other sounds remarkably like a King.

Robin Hood Had It Easy

Robin Hood’s world was simpler. The Sheriff took the money. The King had the money. Robin Hood took it back.

Modern America is infinitely more complicated. Our government simultaneously taxes, borrows, spends, subsidizes, transfers, regulates and pays interest on previous borrowing. There is no single wagon carrying the King’s gold through Sherwood Forest waiting to be intercepted. Our wagon is an electronic ledger containing trillions of dollars — and we owe part of the wagon to somebody else.

That means returning money to taxpayers must be accompanied by something much harder: returning discipline to government. A taxpayer dividend financed by additional borrowing would merely hand today’s citizen money while sending tomorrow’s citizen the bill. That isn’t Robin Hood. That’s borrowing from our grandchildren.

The genuine version requires reducing the cost of government first. Eliminate waste. Demand efficiency. Question programs that no longer accomplish their purpose. Reduce unnecessary bureaucracy. Control borrowing. Then, when genuine savings or extraordinary revenues exist, ask a revolutionary question: why should Washington automatically get to keep them?

Political slogans do not repeal mathematics. But neither should complicated mathematics obscure a simple constitutional principle: the government belongs to the governed. Michael T. Ruhlman

The People Are the Shareholders

Perhaps the better analogy isn’t Robin Hood at all. Perhaps it is corporate America.

A corporation belongs to its shareholders. Management operates the company, but management doesn’t own the enterprise merely because it controls the bank account. When a successful company generates excess capital, its board has choices: invest it, reduce debt, acquire productive assets, or return capital to shareholders.

Government should face a similar discipline — not because America is literally a corporation, which it isn’t, but because elected officials are stewards. They are managing something that belongs to somebody else. Us.

That concept has been disappearing from American political language. We increasingly speak about what “the government will pay for.” But government has no money independent of the people. It can obtain money only through some combination of taxation, fees, asset income, monetary mechanisms and borrowing against future revenues. Every government check ultimately has someone standing behind it. Frequently that someone is the taxpayer. Sometimes it is the future taxpayer.

Sherwood Forest Comes to Washington

That is why Trump’s argument resonates with people far beyond the accounting details. It taps into something older than Republican or Democrat. People want to believe they still own their government. They want to believe Washington works for them, and that when government becomes more efficient, they should share in the benefit.

Whether Trump’s particular proposals ultimately accomplish that is a separate question. Every proposal should survive arithmetic. Every claimed saving should be verified. Every dividend should identify its funding source. Every tax reduction should be weighed alongside spending and debt.

Political slogans do not repeal mathematics. But neither should complicated mathematics obscure a simple constitutional principle: the government belongs to the governed.

Robin Hood’s rebellion was against a system in which the King stood above the people. America was founded on precisely the opposite arrangement. Here, the people stand above the government. Presidents are temporary. Congresses are temporary. Administrations are temporary. Bureaucracies should remember that they, too, exist only because the people authorize their existence. There are no royal subjects here. There are citizens.

When Washington Became the King

Perhaps Washington never consciously decided to become the King. Perhaps we allowed it to happen.

We demanded services without demanding efficiency. We accepted borrowing without calculating repayment. We celebrated government benefits without always asking who paid for them. We permitted temporary programs to become permanent institutions. And gradually the language changed. Washington began talking about its revenues, its programs, its spending and its money.

There is one phrase worth restoring to American political vocabulary: our money.

Not because taxation is illegitimate. Not because every government program is wasteful. And certainly not because every dollar collected should immediately be returned. But because remembering who owns the castle changes how carefully the people inside it spend the gold.

Robin Hood supposedly asked who had a right to the King’s money. America faces a far more important question: when did the people’s money become the King’s?

Perhaps the answer is that it never did. And perhaps Washington occasionally needs to be reminded.