Oh, what a card Mr. Heinlein was! A common school of
thought about him was that, starting with Stranger in a Strange Land
(1961), he wrote novels that were, as summarized by Gary Westfahl for Locus
Magazine, “increasingly long-winded, idiosyncratic, and highly opinionated”—not
to mention reflective of his libertarian beliefs.
The quote above merely expresses, in tongue-in-cheek
form, what Heinlein concluded in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966): “There
is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely
because you think it would be good for him.”
Still, in the current political environment, today’s
quote belongs in the “don’t try this at home, folks” category. With or without
liquor, taking a shot at a tax collector is not a good idea—even if the tax
system is intrusive and inequitable, and even if the tax collector one
encounters is as obnoxious and allegedly criminal as Joel Greenberg, the
(perhaps former?) friend of Congressman Matt Gaetz.
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