Milanovic 

What had we learned in economics this year?
Foreign govt reserves can be seized
Foreign private assets can be frozen
Price controls can be imposed.
Now, go back to Econ 101

Watching Europeans govt's argue in favor of price controls while their own representatives have spent half-a-century voting for IMF programs that would abolish price controls anywhere else is...well, a spectacle.

 The first two read as simple and sharp irony. but then he blows it.

Some of the comments I got on my tweet pointing out a glaring inconsistency between supporting price control in own country A, while being against them, and making sure they are abolished, in countries B to Z, reminded me of a possibly worst intellectual experience I had.

I was invited to join a list that seemed to have been composed liberal Dems. In those days I thought such people are some kind of US social-democrats. It turned out they were far from it. But the really bad part of the experience was their pervasive "mauvaise foi".

I have never encountered, even among the most dogmatic Stalinists, such hypocrisy and lying which for them, having practiced it so much, has become a way of life. They were also smart. So every argument that was going against their PoV was twisted, distorted, repackaged,

intentionally misinterpreted with the sole objective that every mistake, every hypocrisy, every lie would be covered up. I quickly realized that they were utterly uninterested in truth.

Their twisting of truth had in addition a certain malignant or perverse character. One could feel they were very happy to have shown themselves clever enough to demonstrate that the obvious truth really was not true.

He's describing the experience of structural outsiders in every system. The politics of truth is always a fantasy of uncorrupted power.  That's why his "paleo-left agenda" is so conflicted.