"Harry Harrison - SSR 04 - The Stainlees Steel Rat Wants You" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

"Unhappily you will," I told him. "Your lives have been sheltered up until now, in that you
have been spending but not earning. Soon you will be earning like the rest of us and, with the


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arrival of your first credit, sweat of your palms and brow, the tax man will arrive as well.
Swooping in ever smaller circles, screaming shrilly, until he perches on your shoulder and with
yellow beak bites most of the money from your grasp."

"You sure turn a nice simile, Dad."

"It's true, it's true," I muttered, swinging into the motorway and roaring into the fast lane.
"Big government means big bureaucracy which means big taxes; there seems to be no way out of it.
Once you're involved in the system you are trapped, and you end by paying more and more taxes.
Your mother and I have a little nest egg put aside for investing for your future. Money earned
before you lads were born."

"Money stolen before we were born," Bolivar said. "Profits from illegal operations on a dozen
worlds."

"We didn't!"

"You did, Dad," James said. "We broke into enough files and records to find out just where all
the money came from."

"Those days are behind us!"

"We hope not!" both boys said in unison. "What would the galaxy be like without a few
stainless steel rats to stir them up. We have heard your bedtime lectures about how bank robbery
helps the economy. It gives the bored police something to do, the newspapers something to print,
the population something to read about, the insurers something to pay off. It is a boost to the
economy and keeps the money in circulation. It is the work of a philanthropist."

"No! I did not raise my boys to be crooks."

"You didn't?"

"Well, maybe to be good crooks. To take only from those who can afford it, to injure no one,
to be kind, courteous, friendly and irreverent. To be crooked just long enough to be enlisted in
the Special Corps where you can serve mankind best by tracking down the real crooks."

"And the real crooks we are tracking down now?"

"The income tax people! As long as your mother and I were stealing money and spending it there
were no problems. But as soon as we took our hard-earned salaries in the Corps and invested them
we ran afoul of the tax people. We made a few minor bookkeeping errors. . ."