Free Republic

An earlier column questioned recent allegations that U.S. manufacturing has suffered a long-term secular decline rather than a routine but painful cyclical recession. I received a number of critical comments, some from online bulletin boards. Many misunderstood the distinction just mentioned, between secular and cyclical trends, and nearly all the critics misunderstood the statistics. I am certainly not claiming that all manufacturing industries are now flourishing in every state. On the contrary, industrial production in August was barely 1 percent above the cyclical trough in December of 2001. But suffering for a few years during and after a recession is...