Here is another argument:
Every great manufacturing power rose to its heights with an effective tariff to assure the home market. That includes:
England
France
Germany
Sweden
The Soviet Union (not quite but they were closed to foreign products politically)
The US
Japan
China (do it now)
The UK, Russia, France and American have seen their manufacturing economies collapse when they opened up their markets.
Sweden was kind of free trade, but they have very heavy consumption/value added taxes which effectively functioned the same way as a tariff.
There is not a single example of a “free trade” state building up a impressive manufacturing sector except Singapore and Hong Kong, but these were city states, not nations. One could argue that the that in both cases was due to their location alone that allowed this. Every single major country that became a manufacturing giant did it with a tariff/value added tax system designed to protect their own industries.
I would put the Free Trade guys in with other utopians. They refer to Ricardo and Adam Smith as if their books from the late 18th and early 19th century are handed down from G-d, rather than the works of fallible men looking at similarly constrained small European states.
Their ideas sound great, they should work, but history shows us...they do not.
And that leaves out the idea of free trade implies free movement of capitol and people, which is a similarly a bad idea.
How about the United States until 2008? Sorry, it doesn't fit the narrative. My bad.
BRAVO!
On the other hand, you don’t want to carry protection too far. The more protected domestic industries are from foreign competition, the more stagnant, inefficient, and unproductive they become. We don’t want that either.
>I would put the Free Trade guys in with other utopians. They refer to Ricardo and Adam Smith as if their books from the late 18th and early 19th century are handed down from G-d, rather than the works of fallible men looking at similarly constrained small European states.
>Their ideas sound great, they should work, but history shows us...they do not.
You certainly build much better arguments than I. Free trade is so much like Socialism/Communism. On paper it should work but every time it’s tried it’s a disaster and the free traders refuse to deal with the failures and blame someone else, just like the Socialists/Communists.
>The Soviet Union (not quite but they were closed to foreign products politically)
The Soviet Union is a really interesting case. They didn’t really build the machines needed to create first class factories, but they did trade raw materials to the US and Germany for the machine tools required for first class factories. Then over time as they they consumed more and more natural resources in order to raise living standards by producing more goods from the factories, they had less and less trade capital to acquire good machine tools for industrialization. Because of this they actually became less rich as their population grew because their raw resource production never really increased with population size and because they couldn’t afford better industrial tools their factories never got more efficient. It was a crazy system.
The only part of the soviet system that produced proper industrialize tools was the military which also happened to be the only finished products that where widely distributed outside the Soviet Union. When we got a good look at the country in the 90s we found most of their non Military factories were still using 1930s and 1940s tech often with the original US or German machines.