Black sheep

Once upon a time there was a country where everyone was a thief.

In the evening, armed with master keys and blackout lanterns, they would go out and burgle their neighbors' homes. When they returned home at the crack of dawn with their stolen goods, they always found that their own home had been stolen.

So they lived happily together. There are no unhappy people, for everyone steals from everyone else, who steals from everyone else, and so on, until the last person goes to the first burglar's house and steals. The country's trade is inevitably a two-way fraud between buyer and seller. The government is a criminal institution that steals from its subjects, and their subjects are only interested in deceiving the government. So life is smooth, there is no rich or poor.

One day -- no one knows how -- an honest man came to live there. In the evening, instead of going out with a lantern in his pocket, he stayed at home smoking and reading novels.

The thief came, saw the light was on, and did not go in.

This went on for some time. Then they felt obliged to make it clear to him that he had no reason to stand in the way of other people's work, even if he wanted to do nothing. He stayed home every night, which meant that one family had no food for the next day.

The honest man felt powerless against such logic. From then on he went out like them at night and returned in the morning, but he did not steal. He is honest. There's nothing you can do about it. He went to the distant bridge and watched the river go by. Every time he comes home, he finds his house stolen.

Within a week the honest man found himself penniless; His house was bare and he had nothing to eat. But it was not nothing, for it was his own fault; No, the problem is that his behavior is upsetting other people. Because he lets others steal everything from him and steals nothing from others; So that some one would come home at dawn and find the house untouched -- where honest men should have gone to rob it. Before long, the families who had not been robbed found that they were richer than the others and did not want to steal any more. What is worse, those who go to steal from honest men always find it empty, so they become poor.

Meanwhile, the rich, like the honest, have formed the habit of going to the bridge at night, and watching the river go under it. This makes things more confusing, because it means more people are getting rich, and more people are getting poor.

Now those rich people find that if they go to the bridge every day, they will soon be poor too. They thought, "Let's hire the poor ones to steal for us." They sign a contract, determine the salary and how to share it. Of course, they are still thieves and still cheat each other. But the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

Some people are so rich that they don't have to steal or hire someone to do it at all to stay rich. But once they stop stealing, they will become poor, because poor people will steal from them. So they hired the poorest of the poor to guard their wealth from the poor, which meant setting up police stations and prisons.

So, a few years after the honest man appeared, people stopped talking about stealing or being stolen, and only spoke of rich and poor; But they were all thieves.

The only honest man was the one at the beginning, but he died soon after, starving to death.