But when you impose tarriffs, the price of everything goes up, and pretty soon the poor people that you were trying to protect can't afford to buy anything. And "poor" is a pretty subjective word when 98% of the homes in this country have a television. We really have no poor in this country, we just have a political party that loves class warfare. That guy has more than you, so he must be evil.
But when you are competing against slave labor, you will loose in the end anyway.
"But when you impose tarriffs, the price of everything goes up, and pretty soon the poor people that you were trying to protect can't afford to buy anything."
Prices do not go up infinitely.
And they don't go up on everything.
They specifically go up on the things that we import in large volume from low-skilled overseas workers: textiles, steel. We don't yet have free flow of agricultural products and truck drivers from Latin America, but get CAFTA going and you can watch the Midwestern farms go out of buysiness and all th3e trcukers switch over to being Juan Valdez too.
There is no job that Americans do that cannot be done as well by a foreigner for a lot less money. I note that company health plans in some places are now encouraging ill workers to fly to Asia for major operations. It's cheaper over there. EVERYTHING is cheaper somewhere else.
For comparison's sake, the states in the US which have won the "race to the bottom" in terms of corporate regulation and taxation are NOT the most prosperous or best educated by any stretch of the imagination. There is a level of government infrastructure and regulation which makes for more profitable and efficient markets than quasi-total deregulation does.
Interesting that the word "socialist" gets bandied about incorrectly a lot whenever one wishes to speak sanely about taking care of one's own people.
But here's another word: globalist. The net result of absolutely free trade in a world full of dictatorships - including the 1.1 billion man Chinese dictatorship - is that every one of your industries goes out of business over time. If we can do it, they can do it cheaper. And will. So, we either become like them, or we decide that unfettered globalism doesn't take us to the place we want to be.