"I'm after a man whom I want to destroy. He died many centuries ago, but until the last trace of him is wiped out of men's minds, we will not have a decent world to live in."
"What man?"
"Robin Hood."
"He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich---or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.
"I seized the boats boats that sailed under the flag of the idea which I am fighting: the idea that need is a sacred idol requiring human sacrifices---that the need of some men is the knife of the guillotine hanging over others---that all of us must live with our work, our hopes, our plans, our efforts at the mercy of the moment when that knife will descend upon us---and that the extent of our ability is the extent of our danger, so that success will bring our heads down on the block, while failure will give us the right to pull the cord. This is the horror which Robin Hood immortalized as an ideal of righteousness. It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of
property, but as a champion of
need, not as a defender of the
robbed, but as a provider of the
poor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practicing charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce, only to want, that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his inferiors at the price of robbing his superiors. It is this foulest of creatures---the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich---whom men have come to regard as a moral idea. And this has brought us to a world where the more a man produces, the closer he comes to the loss of all his rights, until, if his ability is great enough, he becomes a rightless creature delivered as prey to any claimant---while in order to be placed above rights, above principles, above morality, placed where anything is permitted to him, even plunder and murder, all a man has to do is to be in need. Do you wonder why the world is collapsing around us? That is what I am fighting. Mr. Rearden. Until men learn that of all human symbols, Robin Hood is the most immoral and most contemptible, there will be no justice on earth and no way for mankind to survive."
