This year, Iceland will become the first European country that hit crisis in 2008 to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output. In spite of its total 180-degree treatment of nefarious bankers, the banking system, and the people of its nation when compared to America (or The UK), Iceland has proved that there is a different (better) option that western dogma would suggest. As abhorrent as this prospect is to the mainstream's talking heads and Keynesian Klowns who bloviate wildly on macro-economics and endless counterfactuals, Iceland came to that fork in the road, and took it...

As The Independent reports,

While the UK government nationalised Lloyds and RBS with tax-payers’ money and the US government bought stakes in its key banks, Iceland adopted a different approach. It said it would shore up domestic bank accounts. Everyone else was left to fight over the remaining cash.

It also imposed capital controls restricting what ordinary people could do with their money– a measure some saw as a violation of free market economics.

The plan worked. Iceland took a huge financial hit, just like every other country caught in the crisis.

This year the International Monetary Fund declared that Iceland had achieved economic recovery 'without compromising its welfare model' of universal healthcare and education.

Other measures of progress like the country’s unemployment rate, compare just as well with countries like the US.

Rather than maintaining the value of the krona artificially, Iceland chose to accept inflation.

This pushed prices higher at home but helped exports abroad – in contrast to many countries in the EU, which are now fighting deflation, or prices that keep decreasing year on year.

With the reduction of capital controls – tempered by the 39 per cent tax – it continues to make progress.

"Today is a milestone, a very happy milestone," Iceland’s finance minister Bjarni Benediktsson told the Guardian when he announced the tax.