"Robert A. Heinlein - Take back your Government" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

What did he get out of it? Nothing, but the satisfaction of knowing that he
had made his state a better place for his kids to live.
The Guses and the Susies in this country are the people who have
preserved and are preserving our democracy - not the big city bosses, not
the Washington officeholders, and most emphatically not your loud-mouthed
and lazy brother-in-law.10
I have said that the rest of the book will tell only things that you will learn
anyhow, through experience. They will be recounted in hopes of saving you
much time, much bitter experience, and in the expectation that my own
experiences may make you more effective more quickly than you otherwise
might be. I also hope to brace you against the disappointment and
sometimes disheartening disillusionments that are bound to come to anyone
participating in this deadly serious game.
One warning I want to include right now, since you may not finish reading
this book.
You are entering politics with the definite intention of treating it as a
patriotic public service. You intend to pay your own way; you seek neither
patronage nor cash. Almost at once you will be offered pay. You will turn it
down. Again and again it will be offered and patronage as well.
There will come a day when you are offered pay to campaign for an issue
or a man in whom you already believe and most heartily and to whom you
are already committed. The offer will come from a man who is sincerely your
friend and whom you know to be honest and patriotic. He will argue that the
organization expects to pay for the work you are already doing and dial you
might as well be paid. He honesty prefers for you to be on the payroll; it
makes the whole affair more orderly.
16
 Everything he says is perfectly true; it is honest pay, from a clean source,
for honest work in which you believe. It happens that just that moment a little
extra money would come in mighty handy. What should you do?
Don't take it!
If you take it, it is almost certain to mark die end of your climb toward the
top in the policy-making councils of your party. You are likely to remain a two-
bit, or at best a four-bit, ward heeler the rest of your life. A volunteer fireman
need not have money to be influential in public affairs, but he must not accept
money, even when it is clean money, honestly earned. If you take it you are a
hired man and hired men carry very little weight anywhere.11
There is a corny old story about a sugar daddy and a stylish and beautiful
young society matron. The s.d. offered her five thousand dollars to spend a
week at Atlantic City with him. After due consideration she accepted. He then
offered her fifty dollars instead. In great indignation she said, "Sir, what kind
of a woman do you think I am?"
"We settled that," he told her. "Now we're haggling over die price."
Don't make the mistake she did. There is however some sense in
haggling over die conditions. If you reach die point where your party wants
you to accept a state or national party post, for full-time work in a position of
authority, or your government asks the same thing of you, under
circumstances where it is evident that you must surrender your usual means
of livelihood, go ahead and take it, if you honestly believe that your services
are needed and that you can do the best job that could be done by any of die