A person needs certain categories of things to continue life: security (ranging from personal to a planetary), food (ranging from cornbread to haute cuisine), clothing (ranging from loin cloths to spacesuits) and shelter (ranging from hut to hall), entertainment (ranging from cards to digital experiences).
If left alone anywhere on the Earth, an individual would seek out these things. By getting together in tribes, states and nations, individuals can work together to get more of these things, and better.
In any large group of people, a nation perhaps, individuals thereof get right to work learning how to make items from one or more of the categories. Others put together ways to broadcast the items. By providing what someone else needs, and with the help of a medium of exchange, an individual can trade his items for some of the medium and use it to acquire needs from any category.
The ability to acquire items to satisfy the needs in each category depends entirely upon working in either the production of distribution of same. Since the economy is simply trading with one another, price is indexed by cost of the labor, and most items of each category is reachable by everyone.
Thusly does the group, or nation, serve the only conceivable reason for its existence.
In our history until the present, plus or minus a couple decades, we in this nation made what we needed, buying and selling to each other. The national fare was spiced with imports of sundry items, and we sold some surplus internationally. As a matter of fact, we build a wealthy and powerful nation doing precisely that.
This above method, "protectionism", of benefiting the individuals that make up a nation is founded in dependency of each on all of common goal, and has been proven to work to the enrichment of all involved. The method, "free trade", of benefiting those same individuals is founded in dependency of each to others of different, and potentially threatening, goals.
If we are going to call ourselves "conservatives", we need to do what conservatives do, enshrine in custom and practice that which we know works.
Tell me, how does it benefit the people of this nation to abandon an economic system has been proved viable, and embracing one that is experimental and dangerous on it very face?