>makes you less vulnerable to foreign economic pressure
Should someone in the city block next to mine be allowed to sell in mine? How about the next town, state, country, continent? Where ever you draw the line is who you've --implicitly-- declared economic war with.
But why argue theory when we have empirical evidence. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis... : "none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules."
Please tell me how you are able to interfere in trade without violence. Interference necessitates violence. If country A has a ban on products from country B, country B sends a ship with products to country A. To enforce the ban, men with guns from country A are going to detain the ship.
You are arguing for a paradigm where the crew on the ship should be imprison or arrested (or worse) when they have aggressed against no person nor their property.
And I have no clue where you got the idea the crew would be worse than arrested. This has happened before, you know - they're simply not allowed to unload the ship or enter the country. By the dreaded men with guns.
Authority is different from aggression. If Alice and Bob, ex ante, agree to have Mandy the mediator settle a contract they have willingly given her authority. Mandy's authority does not depend on a violation of two-party consent.
>they're simply not allowed to unload the ship or enter the country
The implicit action is that they'll be shot or imprisoned if the refuse to follow the orders.
If I own the dock and then the political establishment changes who I can associate with "Anyone except those foreign devils from Country B!" they have effectively stolen from me (called a Taking). I used to have a product that could do X and Y and now only X. Saying that I'm free to immigrate to a different country is theft apology.
It's impossible to conduct trade on a meaningful scale without debt, and debt is always backstopped by violence.
Innovation and open competition can interfere with trade without violence.
"Asian carp cause serious damage to the native fish populations in the lakes and rivers that they infest because they out-compete other fish for food and space. " https://www.nps.gov/miss/learn/nature/ascarpover.htm
If you're "good enough" today, you might be able to develop significant marketshare and be able to prevent a better, but later competitor from developing momentum.
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the successes of American internet companies abroad are that way. They have the scale to drop a basically complete product on a new market overnight. It may not be perfectly designed for local tastes and needs, but it's good enough and nobody local who comes later is going to have the economic muscle to compete with Google/Amazon/whatever. Over time, they might gradually get the right product, but there's no priority if you're already an unchallenged #1.
With protectionism, local competitors can make a case for investment and long-term thinking. If you know that the foreign competitors are going to be hamstrung, you have the breathing room to spend the extra effort to build the right product.
I suspect both Yandex and Baidu benefitted from this type of protectionism and evolved into successful businesses of their own, who can now compete on their better product-market fit. In a cutthroat market, would they have lasted 12 rounds with a localized Google?