Note to Pundits: Patents Are Walls

Sorry couldn't resist, but the lecture on why we should not care about manufacturing jobs from Eduardo Porter brought it out in me. Porter makes many valid points. Manufacturing has been declining as a share of total employment in the United States for half a century. The same is happening almost everywhere else in the world. And, he's right that the main cause has been productivity growth.

But that doesn't change the fact that the huge explosion in the trade deficit in the decade following 1...