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Comment by confuseddesi | Hacker News Reader

That is the case even today; American engineers compete with foreign engineers housed across the world. The difference here is that there is some benefit in having workers come domestically - communication and collaboration among other things improve. American employers will hopefully be driven to pay better wages to Americans already here instead of importing cheaper labor.

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Or more likely those companies will now be unable to compete with foreign companies employing those people. No country has ever produced domestic prosperity by restricting trade.

> No country has ever produced domestic prosperity by restricting trade.

Correction, all countries that have ever existed restrict trade, and all of the most prosperous nations today heavily control their trade across nearly every industrial segment. The sole variance is the level of restriction or tariff that they utilize depending on their context or skill at trade & production.

That includes present day Germany (a big restrictor of trade, heavily tilting their export/import ratio to a $300 billion trade surplus), France, Britain, Japan. Even while the US market is more free than most when it comes to trade, it also heavily controls & restricts trade using tariffs and global trade bodies.

That particularly includes China, which has dramatically restricted trade into their nation. They've done so on purpose in order to buy time to build up their domestic giants, which has worked extremely well for them. They've been allowed to have their cake and eat it too for decades.

By itself, China proves that you can get extraordinarily prosperous utilizing trade restriction policies under the right circumstances.

In spite of those restrictions, not thanks to them.

All the richest countries we have today have been among the list of richest since before and after great changes in their protectionist policies.

“No country has ever produced domestic prosperity by restricting trade.”

This sentence feels dogmatic to me. I would like to see a bunch of citations, and even then it would be hard to prove the negative.

I'd like to see a case where it worked.

In any case(!), the economic principle at work here is the law of comparative advantage.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as...

To claim that protectionism improves prosperity is to claim that the law of comparative advantage is incorrect.

I shed a tear in Ricardian.

Of all the purported liberal ideas the U.S. thinks it embraces, restriction of immigration is one of the most baffling.

This is an extremely uninformed opinion. First world countries restrict trade all the time. It's a mantra disseminated by first-world economists to justify breaking down trade barriers in third-world countries and set up shop more easily.

It has been seen time and time again. It would be great is this meme were put to rest.

> First world countries restrict trade all the time.

That's true. That doesn't mean it produces prosperity. Consider that those same countries impose sanctions on other countries to punish them.

How is a sanction different from protectionism?

Consider also a more comprehensive implementation of protectionism - Smoot-Hawley, which is credited as being a major cause of the Great Depression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...

Those are a bare few data points that don't contemplate the history of technological and economic development. Historically, countries which want to develop their local industries protect them heavily when they're in a phase where they cannot compete against external forces until such point at which they can actually deal with the international market.

This has been one of the ways in which China has improved technological innovation at an incredibly fast pace.

You can easily compete with a foreign company that hires people that are not able to get a 90k offer in the US.

That assumes an equal cost of living in all countries, which is not the case.

Every single propsperous country in the world has become prosperous through a mix of trade, protectionism, and enormous state subsidies.

Protectionism built the prosperity of the British empire yesterday.

Protectionism is building prosperity in China today.

I'm not saying protectionism is always right, I'm saying do what gets results. Sometimes that's free trade. Sometimes that's protectionism.

Did it? Or did the advantages of the British empire being a global free trade zone outweigh the deleterious effects of protectionism?

Did you know that New York City was founded to get out from under protectionism, and became the economic capital of the world?

Yes. And I hope India will increase its protectionism as well. I don't see why Flipkart has to compete with Amazon. Why do we need Whirlpool or GM when there are Indian companies that will help create jobs in India?

You make a good point. Why should we have free trade without free movement of labor?

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