Wealth & Money Quote by Robert A. Heinlein

Heinlein lands this as a frontier gag with a civic bite: alcohol doesn’t just loosen morals, it makes rebellion incompetent. The joke isn’t that you’ll commit violence after a few drinks; it’s that you’ll bungle even the violence you’ve romanticized. “Tax collectors” aren’t random villains. They’re the face of the state at your doorstep, the bureaucratic receipt for living in a society. Heinlein knows how easily libertarian fantasy turns into a barroom story where the hero is always one drink away from “taking a stand.” Then he punctures it with the ugliest, funniest detail: you miss.

That last word is the hinge. It reframes the whole setup from moral warning to competence warning, a very Heinlein move. He’s less preachy about sin than about agency. Strong drink doesn’t just erode judgment; it sabotages your self-image as a rational actor. The subtext is that people like to outsource their worst impulses to substances, then launder them into ideology. Booze becomes a permission slip to act out grievances you were already carrying, except now you can’t even execute the fantasy cleanly.

Context matters: Heinlein wrote across mid-century America, when suspicion of government power and celebration of rugged individualism sat beside expanding federal bureaucracy and Cold War discipline. The line reads like a toast and an indictment. It warns that intoxication doesn’t make you freer; it makes you sloppy in exactly the moments you most want to feel in control.