Kevin D. Williamson of National Review wisely notes:
“The populist Right’s descent into Trumpism has been
accompanied by another chorus of that great daft stupid hymn of American
political economy: “We Don’t Make Things Here Anymore.” That is completely
untrue, of course: As measured by the Industrial Production Index, we’re
producing four times as much today as we did in 1960. Our exports have been
flirting with record levels for a while, and we export many times more than
what we did in the 1950s or 1960s. The largest markets for our exports are also
the countries from which we take most of our imports: Canada, Mexico, and
China. This is no surprise. …
Question: Would you rather your grandchildren worked in a
Boeing factory, or in a flip-flop factory? Would you rather be a midlevel
employee at a textile mill, or at Apple? Of course there is some wage at which
working in a flip-flop factory is attractive, but the median American would-be
flip-flop engineer’s next-best option is a lot more attractive than that of his
counterpart in Wenzhou, and, so, that’s that.”
----------
----------
A great note on a common misconception regarding trade from Daniel Ikenson:
“A noxious fallacy that
perpetuates confusion and fuels antipathy toward trade and trade agreements is
that trade is a competition played between national teams where the objective
is to obtain a trade surplus. Under this “Us versus Them” portrayal,
exports are Team America’s points; imports are the foreign team’s points; the
trade account is the scoreboard; and, since the scoreboard shows a deficit, the
United States is losing at trade.
But trade is not a team
sport. Trade is conducted by billions of individuals, each seeking to obtain
value by exchanging some of their specialized output (monetized in the form of
salaries or wages) for some of the specialized output of others. The purpose of
trade policy is not to secure a trade surplus, but to facilitate this process
of specialization and exchange and, ultimately, to produce economic growth.”
Related: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/18/trumps-trade-rhetoric-stuck-in-a-time-warp/
[Update] Robert Samuleson on Trade Myths on Realities
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trade-myths-and-realities/2016/03/20/9f6d9d30-ed1e-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html
[Update] Robert Samuleson on Trade Myths on Realities
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trade-myths-and-realities/2016/03/20/9f6d9d30-ed1e-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html
A Reality Check on NAFTA
Antidumping Duties – An Insidious Form of Protectionism
Economist Mark Perry on Misconceptions Regarding Trade
Deficits:
As usual, Scott Sumner offers a useful corrective to the
media hysteria regarding US-China trade:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2016/03/is_china_trade.html
The Trade-Balance Creed:
Debunking the Belief that Imports and Trade Deficits Are a “Drag on Growth”
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tpa-045.pdf