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Defending our technological and scientific independence is anything but statist. If you think we can continue on our present course without losing scientific superiority, you're dreaming. If we lose scientific superiority, we'll lose the next world war.

The question is how, not if we should take action. Don't forget that the firms you're defending as "free market" are multinational. Based on public equity statistics indicating foreign dominance of shared owned, these companies are now mostly owned by people who could care less about the American dream. You can't expect them to protect our national interests. When public equity was owned by Americans, it was an entirely different story.

Much has changed just in the past 10 years, and the old free market paradimgs are collapsing. We need a free American market again.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.--We find ourselves in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of CIVIL and religious LIBERTY, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them--they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Their's was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform. How then shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln

What I buy and from whom I buy it is none of the Government's business. Protectionist whining not withstanding.

(I really like the part about the Ohio River, cracks me up)

A protectionist America is a long time loser. India followed protectionism for years and impoverished their nation. So have most protectionist regimes. One thing we need to understand is that there is no G-d given right for Americans to live better than others. If we do not have better education, better savings rates, more capital friendly regulations we could easily over time fall behind many ohter nations in our standard of living. To think that papering over with protectionism is the answer is unrealistic.