"Foreign Trade Angst" & Free Tibet!

Interesting article by Walter E. Williams (from the Washington Times):

There is great angst over the loss of manufacturing jobs. The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has fallen, and it's mainly a result of technological innovation, and it's a worldwide phenomenon. Daniel W. Drezner, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, in "The Outsourcing Bogeyman" (Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004), notes that U.S. manufacturing employment between 1995 and 2002 fell 11 percent. Globally, manufacturing job loss averaged 11 percent. China lost 15 percent of its manufacturing jobs, 4.5 million manufacturing jobs compared with the loss of 3.1 million in the United States. Job loss is the trend among the top 10 countries who produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output (the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada and Mexico).

h/t the Mark Levin radio show.


Hugh Hewitt & Mark Steyn on Tibet & Iraq (and other things):

HH: Now earlier today at Nationalreview.com, your colleague at the Corner there, Victor Davis Hanson, pointed out the delicious, if it weren’t tragic, irony that all the lefties are chasing the Olympic torch all over Europe, and now San Francisco, in an effort to make a meaningless gesture about the poor Tibetans. But where we actually could make lives better for people who’ve been oppressed by tyranny for a very long time, where we have overthrown an occupier, they want to run away in Iraq. It doesn’t make any sense, Mark Steyn.

MS: No, because in a way, Free Tibet, I mean, actually, I mention this in America Alone. It’s not really what the book’s about, but I just happened to mention it in passing. Free Tibet is the classic liberal cause. It’s the all-time great bumper sticker. You go to any college in America, they’ve got a Free Tibet society. Everyone’s got the bumper stickers. The left, God bless them, got the bumper sticker in 1957, they put it on the Ford Edsel, and every time they buy a new car, they peel the Free Tibet bumper sticker off and put it on the new car. It’s the quintessential liberal cause in that nothing has happened. Nothing is done. It’s a bumper sticker, and that’s where it ends, and Tibet is less free than it ever was, and in fact, has been comprehensively wrecked and undermined by the Chinese. But they don’t mind as long as they get their little bit of posturing out of it.

Yeah, why IS that?