We all know that American workers can't compete with East Asian workers in manufacturing. 

Yet, the Korean automobile firm Hyundai started selling cars in the U.S. around 1986, but they quickly got a reputation for poor quality. A half decade ago, they started assembling Hyundais at a huge plant they built in Montgomery, Alabama. And guess what? Hyundai's reputation for quality immediately shot upwards. The 2011 Sonata has been one of the hottest selling cars of the last year.

There were almost no foreign-owned auto factories in the U.S. until the Reagan Administration, despite ideological doubts over the evils of protectionism, imposed import quotas on Japanese makers, who responded by building factories here. Overall, this seems like one of the better decisions of the Reagan Administration. But in politics these days, victory is an orphan, at least when victories are theoretically impossible under globalist ideology.