"Michael Lewis has documented quite tellingly in Boomerang the dysfunctional country that is Greece – how citizens avoid taxes, how over 600 categories of workers can retire at the age of 50 with full pensions, and how fraud and corruption are endemic. Other stories have surfaced about how few doctors report more than 10,000 euros of income and how few professionals pay their property taxes. Recently, when the current Greek government committed to actually collect some taxes in order to get more loans, a bureaucrat decided that a great way to collect property taxes would be to include them in people's electricity bills, a move that caused an uproar. Lawsuits followed, as the national power company tried to cut off electricity for nonpayment. In a country where it can take a decade for a legal matter to get on a court docket, a court rather quickly took up the case and ruled it illegal for the power company to cut off service for non-payment. This ruling led to a massive financial loss by the power company as people simply stopped paying their electric bills." - Morton Fox from Bookmarklet