Wednesday, June 6, 2012

President of Estonia Goes Ballistic on Paul Krugman

Go Estonia!

Writes Joshua King at Foreign Policy:
Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves -- the "Dean of the Balts" -- is not happy about a blog post Paul Krugman put up today snarking on the country's newfound status as the "poster child for austerity defenders".
Ilves responded from his Twitter account:
Let's write about something we know nothing about & be smug, overbearing & patronizing: after all, they're just wogs: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/estonian-rhapsdoy/
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Guess a Nobel in trade means you can pontificate on fiscal matters & declare my country a "wasteland". Must be a Princeton vs Columbia thing [Ilves went to Columbia for undergrad.]
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But yes, what do we know? We're just dumb & silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa.
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Let's sh*t on East Europeans: their English is bad, won't respond & actually do what they've agreed to & reelect govts that are responsible.
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(htNick)

11 comments:

  1. Ahahahha this is epic!!

    Side note - Krugman focuses on Estonia so much because it flies so boldly in the face of the entire neo-Keynesian school.

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  2. Finally a president who knows what he's talking about and doing something about it.

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  3. As always, you have to watch the pie with Krugman: he "forgotten" to comment on the real news, and the real reason why Estonia is touted as a success; having been on Euro, just as Greece, Spain and other basket cases, Estonia had a GDP growth of 8% in 2011! If "austerity" is really so bad, how come Estonia did not crash?

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    1. Ah, but you see, the defense of the krugmanites is that estonia is small and insignificant and totally dependent on exports (especially to Sweden) to have a surplus.

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  4. Krugman is a joke. He is like a mad magician who shows the audience everything but truth. Yeah, it looks right, but you know it isn't. If you look behind the trick (in this case, produced evidence), you'll see that it's all a big lie.

    Speaking of President Ilves, he used to be in the social democrat party (not anymore). So you can only assume what the more libertarian politicians are thinking of Krugman (and his Keynesian economics). They just can't write that stuff on Twitter. Haha.

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  5. http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/9792/screenshot20120607at091.png

    I wonder what would Krugman say about that chart?

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    1. you expect a Nobel laureate to respond to a chart without any axes labels, sourcing, legends, or explanation ? Wow, !!

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  6. Paul Krugman vs. President of Estonia
    http://www.tarkinvestor.ee/blog.php?idee=50

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  7. IIves is my kinda guy, he's probably fun to drink beer with. I can imagine him and me playing darts over Guiness with a picture of Krugman on the dart board.

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  8. I suspect that Krugman well peg Estonia's success on the extensive EU aid they've received over the last decade or so. He'll slip out of this fairly comfortably, I'd imagine.

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  9. krugman is intellectually dishonest.
    From Paul Krugman's "The Austerity Agenda"

    "Well, that’s where it gets interesting. For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state.”

    Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria.

    And if you look, on the other hand, at the nations conservatives admired before the crisis, you’ll find George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the country’s current economic policy, describing Ireland as “a shining example of the art of the possible.” Meanwhile, the Cato Institute was praising Iceland’s low taxes and hoping that other industrial nations “will learn from Iceland’s success.”"

    *****

    I thought Ireland and Iceland's economy woes are related to property bubbles and financial speculation, but this guy attributes it to minimal government involvement, and thus 'proves' that minimal government involvement is 'bad'.

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