Free Republic

Thomas Friedman’s email account must have been hacked! Assuming the New York Times columnist doesn’t walk his offerings over to the paper’s editorial page office, what else could explain the appearance last night of an essay on trade under his byline so chock full of embarrassing mistakes and stale canards? True, the column had a characteristically clever, Friedman-like premise: Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump shouldn’t be criticizing President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement because it contains exactly the kinds of tough-minded provisions that the champion deal-maker would insist on himself. Unfortunately, whoever really wrote the article revealed such ignorance...

U.S.-made products are losing market share to imports across a wide range of core industries in the United States, according to a new study. Among 114 product categories, U.S.-based producers boosted their domestic market share in only three categories between 1997 and 2005: heavy trucks and chassis, computer storage devices, and computer chips. Imports gained market share in 111 categories. The survey from the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a nonprofit group in Washington of small and midsize manufacturers and a critic of U.S. trade policy, used Census Bureau data. The survey excluded inexpensive consumer products found in Wal-Marts, Targets...