Expat Icelander Baldur Bjarnason has had it with people depicting his native land as a post-crash “progressive paradise” when it’s really a “Thatcherite’s wet dream.”

In a scathing voice and with repeated jabs at the lazy and “innumerate,” Bjarnason writes that leftists who shower Iceland with unqualified praise for ditching creditors and the International Monetary Fund, for nationalizing its banks, providing debt relief, growing as an economy, and handling the Icesave dispute — a row over a defunct, privately owned transnational savings account scheme — are foolishly wrong.

Despite actions taken early in the response to the crisis that might merit some of those kudos, Iceland has retained an active relationship with the IMF; it “tried and tried and tried” to save the creditors — its collapsed banks; it re-privatized “in record time” many of the banks it nationalized; it provided debt relief that favored the wealthy; its economy is merely “running to stay in place” and Icelandic taxpayers will still pay for the damage done by Icesave.

Begin with Bjarnason’s report on Iceland’s treatment of the IMF below.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.