United Liberty

Paul Krugman may have picked a fight with the wrong country. Desparately trying to show that austerity doesn’t work, Krugman posted a graph showing stale GDP growth in Estonia, a tiny Eastern European country, during the worldwide recession. This caught the eye of Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who blasted Krugman on over four separate tweets earlier this week:

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/

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.]

But yes, what do we know? We’re just dumb & silly East Europeans. Unenlightened. Someday we too will understand. Nostra culpa.

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.

The problem with Krugman’s conclusion is that Estonia is actually one of the few Eurozone countries that is doing quite well; a point that Dan Mitchell, an economist at the Cato Institute, noted yesterday: