In my latest Freeman column, I take on Huffington Post author Ian Fletcher on his claim that the United States doesn’t have enough manufacturing. Some excerpts from my article:

To judge whether a sector of the economy is too small, we need criteria. Fletcher writes: “Unfortunately, the only rational standard for how much America should produce is how much Americans wish to consume. Because the only way to consume is either to produce what you wish to consume, or produce something else you can exchange for it” (italics in original).

But if that were the only way, Fletcher should be content–yet he’s not. Why not? Because, as he well recognizes, it’s not the only way, and that’s why he wrote his article. He notes two ways that we consume what we get from foreigners besides selling them goods and services: 1) by selling them assets (these assets are produced, but that’s not what he means) or 2) by borrowing. He objects to both.

And:

By the end of 2009 foreigners owned about $21.1 trillion of the $48.5 trillion U.S. capital stock-over 40 percent. Sounds scary, right? But it overlooks that Americans own $18.4 trillion of the rest of the world’s capital stock. So the U.S. “net international investment position” was negative $2.7 trillion, or less than 6 percent of the U.S. capital stock. Interestingly, even though “our” ownership of “their” capital is less than theirs of ours, in 2009 “we” made $121 billion more on them than they made on us. That suggests the U.S. government’s data underestimate the value of U.S. investments abroad or overestimate the value of foreign investments here, or both.