Pretty Boy Floyd and the Quintessential Leftist Mistake

I woke up this morning with Woody Guthrie's song Pretty Boy Floyd running through my mind.  Specifically, it was the Byrds' version of the song.  Roger McGuinn once introduced this song as being one that others had called Guthrie's "socialist anthem."  McGuinn then said the song didn't seem socialist to him.  But of course, it is.  Because it makes the same basic mistake that almost all Leftists make in their thinking, which is to assume that being generous with money stolen from law-abiding citizens is a virtue.  It is not.

Hear also what Pretty Boy Floyd saith:

"You say that I'm an outlaw; you say that I'm a thief.  But here's a Christmas dinner for the families on relief."

But Guthrie had no right to bestow honor on the outlaw simply because he had given to one set of people goods he had stolen at gun point from another set of people.  And modern Leftists make this mistake all the time.  They truly feel that they have done a charitable act when they force other people to cough up their money and hand it over.

This explain the statistics  one so often sees on the miniscule level of almsgiving by Liberals, such as the one about Al Gore about a decade ago.  Their method is so often to be generous with what they have forced others to send in to the government.  They are brothers in crime with Pretty Boy Floyd.

But of course, it is hard to call any one of Woody Guthrie's songs a "socialist anthem," because nearly all of them are, to one degree or another.  Consider this gem, from This Land is Your Land:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.

In other words:  Feel free to trespass on anyone's private property or even (I suppose) take it.  Because private property was an evil notion for Woody Guthrie, as  I suppose it is for all thieves.
Guthrie did get one thing right, however.  It is this:

As through this world I've wandered,
I've seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

We have a name for the latter set of thieves:  we call them Democrats.