Whereas most of David Brook's winners of the Sidney awards had merit, Mr Brooks got through his analysis of the Greek debt crisis without spelling out the one aspect of the catastrophe that was the main cause of the meltdown. He explains the problems in Greece this way:
His large subject is the tsunami of cheap credit that swept over the world and "offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge."
His specific subject is Greece, a country that plundered its public institutions while spoiling and atomizing itself. The Greek national railroad earned 100 million euros (about $131.4 million) in revenues each year, but had a wage bill of 400 million euros plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The country reported a budget deficit of 3.7 percent a year, but that was inaccurate. It was really about 14 percent of G.D.P.
Lewis’s genius was to show how the moral breakdown spread into one of the most remote institutions on earth, a 1,000-year-old monastery cut off by water, culture and theology that, nonetheless, managed to put itself at the center of the great plundering.
What's missing from this you might ask? The Greeks don't pay their taxes. Here's a taste from the actual Michael Lewis article:
....the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). "It’s become a cultural trait," he said. "The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady."
The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. "If the law was enforced," the tax collector said, "every doctor in Greece would be in jail." I laughed, and he gave me a stare. "I am completely serious." One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. "The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court," he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.
So while emphasizing the "spoiled railroad workers" in his piece and euphemistically talking about "moral breakdown", Brooks never actually states that the moral breakdown was the fact that taxes were never collected.
You have to ask yourself, why would a conservative not want to make it clear that failure to pay taxes leads to the moral breakdown of society? Michael Lewis ends his article with this:
It (Greek society) behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?
Brooks was right to list this article as one of the best of the year. The actual reason why this article was important was either lost on him or purposely ignored.