RALEIGH — My wife and I actually made it out of the Southern Wake Home for Screaming Hood Boys this weekend to catch a movie, a well-written and exciting one at that. A running gag got me to thinking, though, about this question:
If the Pirates of the Caribbean swung onto your ship, took virtually everything, but let you keep a change of clothes, would you feel grateful?
In “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” the hero of the piece “discovers” by the end that, yes, one can be a pirate and a good man. The moment feels better in the context of the film than it does upon further reflection, as the “good” pirates get what they want (the Black Pearl) and are sallying forth to pillage the innocent on the high seas. This is actually a well-worn device in fiction: the good-hearted robber. Its cousins are the good-hearted harlot and the good-hearted swindler. Consider how many movies and television shows have been based on these characters in just the past dozen years or so.
Most of the time, the stories are innocuous (or very well crafted and entertaining, as in the case of “Pirates”). Once in a while, though, the contradiction grates on the nerves, particularly when the literary device is combined with some level of self-satisfied sanctimony. For example, in the thankfully long-gotten “City Slickers 2,” the Billy Crystal character spends the whole movie looking for a moral lesson about life, and finally concludes that dedication to a higher cause is the key. But the “cause” that teaches him this is the search for a cache of gold stolen from a railroad company decades before. Finding and keeping stolen merchandise is, apparently, a morally uplifting act.
Of course, if people in Hollywood actually thought stealing was a crime, about 90 percent of what they produce would never get made, unoriginal as it is.
Back to the moral principle of the “good pirate” for a moment. There’s an example closer to home of the magnanimous mugger. Remember two years ago, when the North Carolina General Assembly raised your sales tax rate by a half-penny? And do you recall the following year, when lawmakers forced local governments to raise the rate by another half-penny? North Carolina consumers got socked with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in higher prices for the goods they buy. Interestingly, a number of supposedly “progressive” lawmakers voted for both of these tax increases, which hit just about everyone who shops in the state but which impose a disproportionately large amount of the burden on lower-income families (primarily because services sold at retail are not taxed, a sticky problem that deserves, or deserved, a separate discussion).
But wait. Clear the decks of rubble, peer through the rhetoric smoke, and be willing to see far beyond that Jolly Roger flying above the Legislative Building. These are “good pirates.” They may have stiffed the taxpayers in order to continue the growth of state government. They did, however, soften the blow with a much-celebrated “sales tax holiday.” With another one coming up this weekend, it’s worth reflecting on how insidious this idea is. There are North Carolinians actually thanking their legislators for giving them a holiday from a sales tax that is too high in the first place. And legislators are shamelessly accepting the credit for the ruse.
Those lovable rogues.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.