Having seen New England, Kentucky’s Henry Clay (1777-1852) was aghast. The senator’s rhetorical flair, however, failed him. He should have described what nowadays would be called the “carnage” caused by the “Britain shock”:

“In passing along the highway, one frequently sees large and spacious buildings, with the glass broken out of the windows, the shutters hanging in ruinous disorder, without any appearance of activity, and enveloped in solitary gloom.”

Clay added: “Upon inquiring what they are, you are almost always informed that they were some cotton or other factory, which their proprietors could no longer keep in motion against the overwhelming pressure of foreign competition.”

Somehow New England thrived despite the end of whaling, the southward migration of the textile industry, the departure of many shoemakers, and other supposed setbacks. 

Protectionists, however, persist in imagining recent calamities that they think validate government curtailments of economic freedom. Hence their lingering preoccupation with the “China shock,” the alleged damage done to American industries and communities by imports from Communist China.

Today, the president’s long list of nations being beastly to America includes mighty Switzerland, which he has threatened with stratospheric tariffs. (Because it has pushed upon Americans unconscionable amounts of chocolates and wristwatches?) The “China shock” was larger than the “Swiss shock,” but not really shocking.

A frequently cited study says China destroyed 2.4 million American jobs between 1999 and 2011. If so, in those 13 years, as many jobs were eliminated by Chinese imports as are eliminated, on average, by the normal churning of the American economy every 41 days. Between 2000 and 2015, the United States’s dynamism involved Americans leaving manufacturing and other jobs about 900 million times.

Manufacturing as a percentage of America’s post-1945 gross domestic product peaked in 1954 and has declined ever since, as it has in most developed nations. The American decline has been remarkably steady, about 2 percent a year, since before the surge of Chinese imports began. 

Economist Veronique de Rugy, of the Cato Institute and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, notes that today’s manufacturing job problem is a shortage of laborers to fill the more than 600,000 openings in the sector.

America’s inflation-adjusted manufacturing output is up 177 percent over 1975, the last year America ran what the president deems indispensable — an annual trade surplus.

George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux, curator of the “Cafe Hayek” blog, writes that industrial production hit a record high in September 2018, “almost 43 years after America began running its still-unbroken string of annual trade deficits in 1975.” 

They began 27 years before China joined the World Trade Organization. Mr. Boudreaux says that since China joined the WTO in December 2001, the average monthly decline of manufacturing jobs as a percentage of nonfarm jobs has slowed  to 0.144 percent from 0.166 percent.

Manufacturing employment has declined primarily because manufacturing moved to more hospitable jurisdictions (often in the American South). And as labor became dramatically more productive because of robotics and automation. 

Similarly, Mr. Boudreaux notes, improved agronomy drove the 20th century’s decline of agriculture employment as a percentage of the labor force to 2 percent in 2000 from 40 percent in 1900. During this dislocation, food surpluses soared, food prices fell, and former farmers did not starve.

Return to New England, though. And to arguments that persist.

Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (1782-1852) refuted Clay’s protectionism. A University of Texas historian, H.W. Brands, in “Heirs of the Founders,” quotes Webster: “Commerce is not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others. … All parties gain, all parties make profits, all parties grow rich, by the operations of just and liberal commerce.”

“If the world had but one clime and but one soil,” Webster said, “if all men had the same wants and the same means … then, indeed, what one obtained from the other by exchange would injure one party in the same degree that it benefited the other.” Actually, however, “We inhabit a various earth. We have reciprocal wants, and reciprocal means for gratifying one another’s wants.”

Clay, though, thought national “honor” was a casualty of American “dependence” on international commerce, so he praised the self-sufficiency of the farm of Kentucky’s first governor: “You will behold every member of his family clad with the produce of their own hands and usefully employed, the spinning wheel and the loom in motion by day-break.” And at nightfall, the family gathers at the hearth to make, with their own hands, smartphones and pharmaceuticals.

The Washington Post