Robin Hood Was No Socialist!

Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; low income housing subsidies; food stamps; government welfare; all of these could be discontinued and the needs of former recipients of government largess will still be met, if research conducted at a California university is put into practice. Of course, that is not the conclusion that the academicians involved in the study reached, but the researchers may have inadvertently provided support to conservatives who favor lower taxes and more involvement by private and religious charitable organizations in caring for America’s poor.

CNN (Reuters) reported last night that a computer lab research project involving 120 students at UC-Davis demonstrated a “Robin Hood” impulse shared by the majority of participants that produced interesting results. According to the CNN piece:

The experiment was carried out last year using 120 paid student volunteers at a computer lab on the campus of the University of California at Davis.

The volunteers sat at computer terminals, and a computer would assign them into groups of four. Once placed into a group, each person was assigned an amount of money and was told how much money the other three members were given.

The players then had the chance to spend some of their own money in order to increase or decrease the amount the others possessed, but their actions provided no financial gain for themselves.

They played the game five times, but never with anyone from a previous group. This was to eliminate the possibility of players trying to establish a reputation for themselves or taking revenge on others who might have taken money from them.

Equalizing income
About 70 percent of participants at some point reduced or added to another person's money, most often by taking from the richest players or by donating to the poorest players, the study found.

These actions had the collective effect of equalizing income among the players -- with participants spending their own money to achieve the goal.
The researchers said even players whose own loot had been pilfered in previous rounds were willing to take steps to redistribute the money in an egalitarian manner.

The term “Robin Hood impulse”, used by Professor James Fowler to describe his findings, is only partially correct. When the players took money from the wealthiest players and gave it to the poorest players, they were exhibiting “Robin Hood” tendencies. However, when players spent their own money to equalize resources among the other players, they were acting charitably. The difference between the two motives is significant and should not be excluded from the reported findings.

The key aspect of these findings is that the players voluntarily spent their own money to help strangers who were struggling financially, out of a sense of egalitarianism. The game, designed to test egalitarianism and its role in human interaction, demonstrated that players consistently sought to share resources even when they did not stand to benefit from that action. There is another term for that, charity, but given the religious implications of that word, academia apparently shied away from applying it to the behavior exhibited by these students.

It is interesting to note that President Bush’s Faith Based Initiatives, which allow the government to “outsource” charitable services to religious organizations already engaged in providing aid to their communities, are roundly criticized on the left for relying too heavily on human charity to care for the poor. These critics are averse to any diversion of taxpayer money away from established bureaucracies. The argument from these critics is that people are selfish and will not redistribute their resources voluntarily to help the poor in their communities, thus the government must take that money by force and give it to the needy or they will not survive. Private or religious charities are never given a fair chance to demonstrate that citizens, out of the same sense of egalitarianism displayed in the UC-Davis study, will rise to the occasion and ensure that the needy among them are cared for.

Instead, government demonstrates in impulse that is much more “Prince John” than “Robin Hood”, in that it forcibly takes an ever-increasing percentage of income from the “rich” and instead of immediately redistributing it to the poor, often hoards it, earns interest dividends from it, and eventually reassigns it to other pressing budgetary concerns. Americans generally are imbued with a sense of fair play, and in that regard possess a “Robin Hood” impulse: we want to voluntarily give our money to charities rather than to greedy government officials who hoard it like the Sheriff of Nottingham.

It should be remembered that Robin Hood was not a socialist. He was not stealing from the rich to give to the poor in a classic redistribution of wealth (at least in the wildly entertaining Disney version). He was actually recovering the people’s money from the government, which had overtaxed them so severely that they could no longer care for the needy among them through their own charitable acts. In essence he was putting taxpayer money back in taxpayer pockets, perhaps a medieval "compassionate conservative." Who among us has not looked at the amount of taxes withheld from a paycheck and felt as pained as Disney’s Robin Hood character whose leg cast was thumped and searched for hidden money by the Sheriff of Nottingham? In that sense, Robin Hood was an egalitarian motivated by charity, who clearly felt that the poor were better cared for by their neighbors and communities than by a distant government unfamiliar with local circumstances.

The fact that 70% of the college students in this study, who have not yet entered the real world of supporting a middle class family on a tight budget and have not yet learned to appreciate how wrong it is to forcibly take money from some to give to others, robbed from the rich to give to the poor, is not particularly surprising. Yet even these students dipped into their own pockets (figuratively) to help level the economic playing field. Private and religious charitable organizations should be given more opportunities to demonstrate that through citizen generosity the needy in local communities can be provided for with less government involvement and state controlled redistribution of income. Likewise, America’s workers should be allowed to keep more of their income, which, as this study illustrated, would result in more donations to local charities.

The “Robin Hood” impulse appears to manifest itself, if unimpeded by the government, in actions that look, to the discomfort of secular academia, like charity. Government assistance programs are the antithesis of charity, for the giver is forced and the recipient is deprived of recognizing the loving sacrifice behind a voluntary donation. Robin Hood risked his life to help the poor, and charitable Americans would willingly do likewise if government loosened its stranglehold on public assistance programs. After all, there is a little of Robin Hood and a divine spark in each of us.