When one limits the choices for purchases or sales, one reduces efficiency, whether it’s limiting to products made at your home, in your city, in your state, or even in your country. It’s failed for so many centuries across hundreds of countries and attempts that it’s not even a question except among politicians stoking fear to gain votes.
Ask these questions. Besides maximizing monetary efficiency:
Does free trade maximize a nation's resiliency?
Does free trade maximize a nation's employment?
Does free trade maximize a nation's security?
Does free trade promote equitable distribution of a nation's wealth?
Unless the question is yes to every answer, it is fair to have a policy debate about how much you are going to limit free trade. Every nation does it to some degree, no matter how much free trade rhetoric they promote.
- We’re the richest nation on the planet and have been until recently been adept in response to many types of disasters. - Unemployment has been <5% for a few years. - The US military reigns supreme. Our 5 air forces are the top 5 in terms of airframes. - We actively pursue fiscal policy to promote inequitable wealth distribution
The idiocy of conflict with China is just that. We’re better and richer together.
But you don't see free trade as a policy promoting inequitable wealth distribution? As designed, free trade is literally moving jobs overseas for lower wages. The primary benefit is higher profits for big companies, and the primary loser is middle to lower class that loses jobs. The best case argument is that the people who lose jobs, and end up underemployed, enjoy cheap imports.
You can check this via BLS, or Census, or on FRED.
And those lower class Americans are higher paid than a huge part of the planet. US poverty level is at the 85th percentile in global income.
You forgot maximizing income on the list. The others are important too.
> security
Far more of an issue after the nationalists destroy the order that provided peace for generations, the most peaceful world in history.