Who To Blame?

Twice as many people work for the federal government than are employed in U.S. manufacturing, according to Wall Street Journal editorialist Stephen Moore. Some 22.5 million work for the Feds, while only 11.5 million are work actually making things. Even worse, says Moore, more Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining, and utilities combined. He's quite right to complain about such a sorry state of affairs. But that pernicious imbalance threatening American economic health is partly attributable to the policies he (and his newspaper) helped promote. Moore was once a fellow at the globalist, free trade think tank, the libertarian Cato Institute, which advocates not just free trade with low-wage Third World countries, but open borders and mass immigration, too. Moore was also president of the commercialist Club for Growth, another staunch advocate of free trade with cheap labor countries, the very policy that helped drive manufacturing out of America and into the the Third World. And the Wall Street Journal itself, for whom he now writes, has a long, long history of undermining American workers through free trade. If Moore wants to know who to blame for the gutting of American manufacturing, he need only review his own resume.