Yes they were. The appeal to authority is just another evidence of your logical fallacies and the silliness of your anti-free trade thinking.
The Founders knew nothing of modern economics. The ideas of Adam Smith hadn’t made it here to clarify that the mainstay of English capitalism, called mercantilism, was an abject failure and was impoverishing and ruining the British Empire.
You might fool the uneducated and those ignorant of history with your appeal to the honorable George Washington and the other Founders God blessed American with, but you won’t fool me. The Founder’s intentions were correct. Limit government.
Say it every morning when you get up. Limit government. Limit government. Limit government.
Instead, you seek to strengthen government and limit people. It’s you who mock the Founders.
A person in 1787 putting forth the idea of off shoring factories(already very profitable) to a primitive country to avoid paying first world wages and reimporting the finished products , duty free, to be sold at first world prices and the profit going to share holders at the expense of an idled work force all the while collecting income taxes to pay "welfare" leaving the bill to the us taxpayer would have been tarred feathered to start with, perhaps shot.