Fallacies frequently repeated don’t thereby become facts.
Editor, LPE Project
Editor:
In what can be charitably described as a feeble attempt to discredit the law-and-economics movement, Darren Bush, Mark Glick, and Gabriel Lozada can’t even keep straight some straightforward facts (“The Great Bounty of Law and Economics,” Sept. 4). They write, for example, that
The advance of the neoliberal agenda can also be seen, as Quinn Slobodian has argued, in the move toward free trade and globalization. Investment abroad primarily involved a shift of manufacturing activity from industrialized countries to developing countries, with a significant number of U.S. companies moving their production, and sometimes their headquarters location, offshore.
In 2021, at least six of the top ten manufacturing countries were decidedly not “developing countries.” In terms of manufacturing value-added, the U.S. was second, Japan third, Germany fourth, Italy seventh, the U.K. eighth, and France ninth.
As for the United States specifically, manufacturing output here hit its all-time high in December 2007, decades after the alleged “neoliberal” coup. Although U.S. manufacturing output is now still six percent below that all-time peak – in your view, despite seven consecutive years now of decidedly anti-“neoliberal” protectionism by the Trump and Biden administrations – it remains far too high to support the insinuation that the U.S. has become deindustrialized. U.S. industrial capacity today is at its all-time high.
Oh, and note this irony: On the very day that Bush, Glick, and Lozada published their lament of the alleged desire of manufacturing firms to flee industrialized countries such as the U.S., the Biden administration announced that it will attempt to block a foreign manufacturing firm’s (Nippon Steel’s) attempt to gain a foothold on U.S. soil.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
