Alan Dean Foster - Man Who Used the Universe [Kindle azw3]

It's very old, the protection racket. So are murder, prostitution, graft, and a number of other sordid frailties that technology cannot seem to cure. These faults are not exclusively human. They're found in other intelligent races. But it's in mankind that technological advancement has outpaced the social to a degree unmatched by any other sentient species.

Longevity institutionalizes vice as well as virtue. Sex has been for sale longer than salvation; stealing money has always been more popular than working for it. It was inevitable that a maturing society unable to eliminate such ills would learn to cope with them. Government was agreeable. Anything, which can be coped with, can be formalized, and anything, which can be formalized, can be taxed.

So it was that Kees vaan Loo-Macklin found himself outside the simple shop front in commercial corridor B of the hundred-kilometer-long cylinder that was the city of Cluria and considered how to go about killing his first man.