Pat Buchanan is an economics moron on a par with Donald Trump. Neither knows a thing about economics, and both are stuck in a kind of pre-Adam Smith mercantilist mindset. That actually might be their appeal to so many people.
The cry that U.S. "manufacturing fell behind" this or that other sector would make sense if it were also true that U.S. productivity declined; but it hasn't. U.S. productivity -- the amount of stuff that a worker can produce with modern computerized equipment -- has not only increased over the past decades, but, at present, it is soaring, and is, in fact, the highest in the world . . . thanks to business investment of capital, mainly in the form of newer and better technology, per worker. Conclusion: manufacturing in the U.S. is going, and will continue to go, the way of agriculture in the U.S.: higher and higher productivity per acre (and higher and higher productivity per worker), therefore necessitating fewer and fewer acres to produce all the food we need domestically and for export (and fewer and fewer manufacturing jobs to make the things we need domestically and for export).
It's called THE LAW OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE. It's stupid, inefficient, and therefore wasteful of scarce resources, including labor to hire U.S. workers to snap together plastic and metal parts for manufacturing smartphones when we ought to be doing more of the high-value work -- designing smartphones -- and letting other labor markets -- like, for example, China -- do the dumb lower-value stuff of snapping the parts together. We BOTH get wealthier by concentrating on tasks that add the most value; conversely, we BOTH get poorer when we try to be self-sufficient and do everything ourselves just because we can.
I suppose I can understand the stubborn ignorance of media whores like Trump and Buchanan; they never needed to learn anything about Economics 101 in the first place so why bother learning it now? But I certainly cannot understand the popularity of 16th-century mercantilist fallacies -- long ago exploded by Adam Smith and others -- by many of the posters on FreeRepublic. If they wish to learn something about basic economics, I can recommend several resources, many of them free PDF downloads or free video lectures. In any case, they should know better.
Only an ignoramus would condescendingly sniff that the manufacturing that has moved or is starting up overseas is nothing but “snapping together plastic and metal parts.”
The fact is that we are running a huge trade deficit in advanced technology products, not just cheap toys.
It is luddite nonsense to conclude that because a particular manufacturing plant becomes more productive and uses fewer workers that these excess workers should become burger-flippers when we see around the world high-tech manufacturing expanding in other countries.
We are placing our own necks in the noose because idiot free-trade purists are spouting comparative-advantage dogma to justify the decline of the United States from a high value-added manufacturing country to an exporter of little other than raw materials and processed food.
The fact is that the “comparative advantage” being gained by other countries is not the natural advantages represented by Scottish sheep or Portuguese wine that were in mind when the theory was postulated but rather the managerial and technological knowledge base which is moving overseas and gaining an absolute advantage because of foolish choices and foolish attitudes on the part of many here.
Take away Boeing, Caterpillar and a few other companies and our ability to compete in export markets in high value-added manufactured products is quite disappointing. We are on the way to being principally an exporter of farm products and other raw materials.
Under the free-trade, open-borders mentality we are stupidly importing a huge population of millions of new workers with an average IQ of no more than 90. As more and more high-tech manufacturing is based overseas, the engineering and managerial expertise will continue to follow and the American workforce will be increasingly unfit to mount a challenge.
In the modern world it is not theoretical unique “comparative advantages” supposedly differing by nation that account for the success of an economy and an opportunity to realize a high standard of living, but rather the brainpower of the workforce and the ability by governments to provide a environment conducive for that brainpower to compete. There is no natural geographic location for that type of advantage. You are stuck in a mindset of the past.
Our worst enemy is our own tax and regulatory policy and political attitudes and brain-dead dogmatists regurgitating misapplied theories.