He skims through the lines, without blinking. Wage freeze. None of his concern. It's been five years since he was a wage-earner; after that he moved out of the apartment block, bought his first house. Now he owns limited companies, five of them. Under ghost-names, of course.

Business is fine. Capital assets are declared, then transferred on paper from one company to another—just so much paper down the sinkhole of the court register. By the time the registration is complete, the firm has filed for bankruptcy, fake receipts are available at half-price, and the reclaimed value added tax is pouring in as annuity. Slush fund money doesn't stain his soft palm—that's what the egghead managers are for.

Declare the profits? No way! He would be ridiculed by the "shady business association". Their world is a zero-balance world. They accumulate overhead costs: three weeks vacation last year in the Bahamas. Blur the accounts, siphon off the money that otherwise might improve the government's finances: that's the unwritten law.

He sighs,sweetens the bitterness in his mouth with a double whisky. Turns to another page, reads about the "maintenance of the forint's exchange rate" and about social-welfare cuts. What are they doing up there in the government? No more family allowances for anyone above the miserable monthly-income level of 15,000 forints, no more child allowances, an education fee introduced, new charges for outpatient care.

He rubs his lips, stares gloomily into the near future. His black-market traders will hike up prices at the Chinese flea market [the former Comecon flea market]. He'll have to give more to the women working illegally in his sweatshops. What else can he do? He'll make it up by increasing his prices. Still, his prices are lower than those charged at the department stores. My god, without him, those miserable wage-earners would be even worse off....

Deeply touched by his own selflessness, he sits in his Jaguar, and suddenly gets a funny idea. What if he visited the local government office and presented an income statement that listed all his legal earnings? Of course he'd have to wait three hours in line and suffer the rank odor of poverty all around him. Certainly he would be eligible for poverty benefits. "Cool prank!"—his buddies in the club would laugh themselves to death. "Why not?" he would retort. But time is money and he can't afford to stand in line. Instead, he meets with his lawyer, who has found some new legal loopholes.

He turns the radio on. Somebody mentions something about 170 billion forints—the amount to be cut from current budget expenditures, thanks to the austerity measures. Fed up with all those troubles, he turns the dial to a rock station. Thus, he misses the commentary that points the finger at him and his fellow club members, saying they are in fact a discredit to what is real entrepreneurialism. Operators in the illegal, black economy, depriving the public of an annual 900 billion forints. Even one-fourth of this sum would give Hungary a chance to breathe more easily.