Perhaps the greatest deceit peddled on publics across the West is that the global economy is struggling.  It is not.

A classic example of the incorrect information being disseminated is the following claim from an article by Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail:

We are in an era – perhaps transitory, maybe longer lasting – in which the world economy has stalled, and we can't simply count on economic growth to give people better lives. It's time to look at social mobility not as something that just happens, but as something we can create.

While far too many bright conservatives spend their time arguing about transsexuals in washrooms, the political left has increased its hold on the bureaucracy, the academy, and the media – all for the purpose of being able to sell its false claims of no global growth.

And why do leftists do this?  Because the liberals know they are economically incompetent, and to keep the public from electing more talented individuals, the public must be convinced that the economic malaise they are experiencing is some global phenomenon, when it most certainly is not.

What the West has become is an anti-meritocracy: the more talented you are, the less likely you are to be placed in a leadership role, and vice versa.  To maintain the incompetentocracy takes continuing propaganda about the mythical global difficulties.

Yet anyone who has traveled abroad understands the false nature of the tale.  Most of our cities, and especially our public infrastructure, are a dump compared to many locations in the so-called "emerging" economies.  We waste scarce public resources on social expenditures; the rest of the world actually creates wealth.

The establishment right is in collusion with the left on this.  The GOPe, as it is now referred to, simply isn't interested in broad-scale wealth creation within the West.  Its globalist financial backers are making too much money off their factories overseas to care what happens here.  And that is why you read so little true critical analysis of actual economic trends in the mainstream media and among the conservative establishment's outlets.

Since 2010, the average annual rate of growth in global per capita GDP has been 1.6%.  The average since 1980 is just 1.3%, and over this time the trend line is upward toward increasing growth rates, not down.

The same applies to global GDP growth, which also demonstrates an upward trend line since 1980, only improving in the future according to IMF projections.  The average rate of annual growth in the world's GDP during the past 35 years has been 3.46%.  Since 2010, it has averaged 3.8%.

Economic times are better than ever before – unless you live in the West under the incompetentocracy.

So what happens when the incompetentocracy recognizes that there is a problem?  Well, recommend that major economies in the West start emulating nations we should in no way want to follow, such as Finland.  Saunders spends his article trying to convince readers of how great Finland's education system is, and how it is benefiting the nation:

It all makes much more sense when you realize that the reforms were not undertaken to improve educational outcomes at all, but to solve a social problem. In the 1970s, Finland was much less equal than it is now, with a poor rural population, dependent on fishing and agriculture, and a well-off urban elite, and very little chance of moving between the two.

The first problem with this argument is that, according to The World Wealth and Income Database, inequality in Finland – as measured by the share of income going to the top 5% and top 1% – has risen dramatically since the early 1980s.  Somehow that doesn't fit the idealized narrative.

More importantly, not only is real per capita GDP in Finland 10% lower than in Canada and a full 26% lower than in the United States, but it is also declining.  Since 2008, Finland's real per capita GDP has dropped 8.5%, while those of the U.S. and Canada have increased more than 3% each.  Finland's per capita wealth has sequentially dropped in each and every year since 2011 as the country falls further behind the rest of the West.

As bad as Canada and the USA are doing economically, Finland is a disaster.  Perhaps the education types don't know how to run a modern nation after all?  But don't tell that to the drama teacher running a G7 nation.