[1rudeboy]

Ikenson slaps Roberts down pretty hard, here:

In an opinion piece published this week, Paul Craig Roberts takes exception to a conclusion in my recent Cato paper about the state of U.S. manufacturing. I usually welcome disagreement as an opportunity to elaborate or persuade. But it’s quite evident that Roberts is not interested in elaboration and is beyond persuasion. The purpose of his dissent was to construct a straw man against which he could present his skeptical, and empirically refutable, views about trade.
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I usually don’t mind disagreement with my point of view. It happens frequently. But I find it offensive when someone disparages and dismisses my work without a coherent basis for doing so.
Paul Craig Roberts Misses the Mark.

[Mase]

But I find it offensive when someone disparages and dismisses my work without a coherent basis for doing so.

Thanks for the link to Ikenson's reply. What he says about PCR above has pretty much been PCR's MO since I joined the forum. This is exactly how our resident paleos reacted to Ikenson's original piece on manufacturing.

[Pelham]

Ikenson slaps Roberts down pretty hard, here:

It appears that Ikenson's 'hard slap' includes an admission by Ikenson that he was making the very error that Roberts claimed he was doing:

"Third, my failure to distinguish between offshored U.S. production and foreign production in the import data is insignificant "

It might be a more convincing rejoinder if it didn't need to acknowledge the error that Roberts was pointing to. It becomes a dispute over the significance of the accounting failure, not whether there was one.