Krugman: "It’s a disaster—and maybe not only an economic disaster"

Paul Krugman has his eyes on a wider world than just these shores, and on a wider problem. In a post innocuously named "Macroeconomic Folly," he first presents the view from 10,000 feet:

[W]hat we’ve witnessed pretty much throughout the western world is a kind of inverse miracle of intellectual failure. Given a crisis that should have been relatively easy to solve — and, more than that, a crisis that anyone who knew macroeconomics 101 should have been well-prepared to deal with — what we actually got was an obsession with problems we didn’t have. We’ve obsessed over the deficit in the face of near-record low interest rates, obsessed over inflation in the face of stagnant wages, and counted on the confidence fairy to make job-destroying policies somehow job-creating.

But economic problems don't just involve economies, do they?

It’s a disaster – and maybe not only an economic disaster.

Then he adds this little burp from our planet's recent and savory past:

Fears of far-right rise in crisis-hit Greece

ATHENS, Greece — They descended by the hundreds — black-shirted, bat-wielding youths chasing down dark-skinned immigrants through the streets of Athens and beating them senseless in an unprecedented show of force by Greece’s far-right extremists.

In Greece, alarm is rising that the twin crises of financial meltdown and soaring illegal immigration are creating the conditions for a right-wing rise — and the Norway massacre on Monday drove authorities to beef up security.

The move comes amid spiraling social unrest that has unleashed waves of rioting and vigilante thuggery on the streets of Athens. The U.N.’s refugee agency warns that some Athens neighborhoods have become zones where “fascist groups have established an odd lawless regime.”

Hey, no problem; just "heartland" folks exercising their Second Amendment solutions. Couldn't happen here, right?

GP