Trump did a good job of destroying that sophistry. If you place tariffs on products, you make the imports more expensive and less competitive with American products. Yes, the consumer may pay more, but American factories staffed by American workers will make those products for domestic consumption. China needs the US market far more than we need it for our exports. We are the world's biggest and wealthiest market. We are being ripped off.
And as Trump pointed out, this gives us leverage so that we can increase access to China's markets for our exports. If the Chinese are not playing fairly, what is the alternative? Shut up and continue buying their stuff?
Chicom slave labor has totally distorted the “free” market. I noticed from old ads that a lawn mower is cheaper now than it was in the 1980’s.
So you’ve just protected an inferior company and failed to deal with the undying causes of what is making that company inferior, which is government-forced higher costs of that domestic company doing business. You’ve also forced a lower standard of living for the American consumer. Open competition free from government interference has always worked and will always work. Protectionism never works and it hides the underlying problems. Around and around we go.
As far as what other countries do, you and others are too worried about that. Countries that defy the simple laws of supply and demand economics by doing things like wage and price controls (”artificially cheap”) will fail sooner or later.
All of this government economic manipulation like currency manipulation, amounts to changing the measurements on a scale and thinking that changes the actual weight of the thing being weighed. Sooner or later, economic realities crush such futility. The strongest countries are those that allow open competition and voluntary market exchanges without government interference. And again, if other countries play these self-defeating games playing economic Russian roulette, it doesn’t mean we have to.
Again, as I’ve outlined, the federal government’s minimum wage and price (tariffs) controls, among other things, are the root causes of our GDP being lower than it should be and the migration of certain industry. The answer isn’t to shut up but to scream vociferously for an end to unconstitutional, wasteful, cost-raising, dead-end government economic interference.