"Leo Frankowski & Dave Grossman - The War With Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

seemed flattered to have me for a customer, and canceled all of his other appointments
for the day to serve me.
For the first half hour or so he talked in generalities. If I wanted both farming and
ranching land, I might find it difficult to compete economically with specialists. The
closer the land was to the city markets, the more expensive it would be. A working farm
was considerably more expensive than wild, undeveloped acreage, and since New
Yugoslavia was so new, there wasn't any old, worn-out land to be had at all.
Finally, absolutely bored with obvious generalities, I had to ask him to get down to
specifics. What did he actually have that was for sale?
It turned out that he had a great surfeit of riches. He had everything in the whole
damned country for sale, except for the surface roads, the public parks and utilities, and
the government buildings. It seemed that every realtor in the country, or maybe on the
whole planet, was tied into the same computerized multilisting service. Furthermore,
almost every Croatian was willing to sell just about everything he owned, if he could just
find somebody to pay him more for it than it was worth.
But only slightly more.
The law in New Croatia required every landowner in the country to figure out what
he thought his land was worth, and to submit that figure to the Land Index. He was then
taxed, based on his own evaluation.
However, if somebody offered to buy the land, he either had to sell it at the price that
he himself had set, or to increase his evaluation by at least five percent.
I thought that it was a clever system, since it completely eliminated the need for
government appraisers, and all of the expense, fraud, and corruption that they naturally
entailed.
One whole wall of the man's large office was a wall screen, a computerized display
screen. With a joy stick for control, you could look at the land from any distance above it,
making the scale of the map whatever you wanted it to be.
You could color code it according to any of hundreds of schemes, from alfalfa,
productivity, tons per hectare, to zebras, probable productivity if any were ever actually
introduced. Or by rainfall, or price, or fertility index. Every single piece of property, from
apartment buildings to wilderness land, and everything in between, had a description
written up on it, with photos. Who owned it, what it was being used for, what the taxes
were, and when they had last been paid.
Failing to pay your taxes for three years got your land automatically sold to the
highest bidder. Your back taxes and a penalty were paid, and you got whatever was left
over. That saved the government the cost of a lot of tax collectors.
When I asked, I found out that taxes were the reason the government had built the
database in the first place, although now they made a profit on it, renting it to realtors.
I gritted my teeth and dug into the Land Index. What I wanted was fairly simple. Just
a big piece of farming and ranching land, cheap.
The realtor was remarkably patient with me, and my translator seemed to have all the
time in the world, so I spent the next four hours sorting through information, tons of it, if
electrons had weighed anything.
The realtor finally said, "You know, sir, there was a time when amazing bargains
could be found in real estate. That was back before the days of central data files, when
the seller might not know the value of what he owned. Those days are sadly gone. Now,
every bit of land is like a blue chip stock on the Exchange. Depending on the market,
values might go up or down by a few percent, but that's about it. Even a supercomputer
couldn't find a great bargain now."
Exhausted, I looked at him, and daylight dawned in the swamp.