Kevin Williamson rebuffs the finger pointing:
China is not the reason that manufacturing began to decline in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. The United States was an uncontested manufacturing powerhouse in the 1950s in no small part because Germany and Japan had been bombed to smithereens, along with much of the rest of the civilized world, while potential global competitors in much of Europe, Latin America, and Asia were suffocating under socialism in various forms. That is no longer the case. The United States is a country with an average household money income of some $50,000 — we are not going to be the world’s leader in low-margin injected-plastic manufacturing. That is not going to happen, and we should not be eager for it to happen.
The Dish 