On Our Greedy Native Bad Boys (and Girls)

digdug wants to know, after yesterday's post, who Iceland's "greedy native bad boys" are. That depends a little on who you ask, but here's my answer: 

[update March 2021: please insert favored pronouns, and add billions to the "dollars in debt" sentence; ]

We've unfortunately got a surplus of white collar criminals here. You know, the type of guy/gal who lines his pockets and takes kickbacks and underbids and practices nepotism and lies for profit and evades taxes. They are men who are tens, hundreds of thousands (millions?!)  of dollars in debt to banks and live swanky lifestyles off of these all-too-easy-to-get loans, then get desperate when loan interest starts eating up their profits. They go criminal with shocking ease; there's no feel that they have pondered the dark side or have been led into temptation. Instead, it's as if crime and swindle were part of their business plan from the get go, and they just had to establish an honorable front to get things started.
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It used to bother me a lot more how rancid the business world is here, given that we're so few and that stealing from "society" in Iceland is simply stealing from your own cousins. But Icelanders have always been rebels and have never been very law-abiding. In the old Alþingi days when important men would meet twice a year at Þingvellir to settle disputes, rule by law seemed to work. But then again, when being outlawed out of society was one of the main punishments, and blood revenge was considered understandable, the stakes were a little higher.
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Today, the threat of bankruptcy or a couple of years in a low-security jail are our only incentives to be good. And both punishments are seen, honestly, as badges of courage...You got caught, huh? well, at least you tried...heh heh heh. Now your famous. And If you consider our past, when survival itself was constantly in question, it's understandable that the national psyche developed into a slightly criminal one. Once beggars, now thieves, kind of thing. It's in all corners of society, from business to politics to non-profit to insurance and health care. Our system is very skewed, and if you don't take what you can Now you might find yourself falling off the boat into good old fashioned poverty, just like great-grandma lived it. Only this time, it's our own people who are the oppressors. Not too funny, is it?
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By the way, it seems that when all the annual known and assumed evaded taxes are tallied, the resulting amount of money could support the entire educational system in Iceland for a year. In the mean time, a poverty-level single mother is arrested for not paying a parking ticket. Hmmm.