Protectionism – All this talk about “morals” when it comes to trade are for communists, socialist, fascists, and supply siders who want to push their tyranny in the place of rational thought. There are religious web sites and places like Salon.com for those sorts of opinions.

To put it simply for those who do not understand – after WWII the U.S. accounted for over half the world’s economy. Everyone sent their resources here because we could turn it into something useful to them. This led to a boom in the standard of living for working class people never seen before in history, and it shall never be seen again.
The world has grown since then. But the U.S. still receives a greater share of the world’s resources then is found on its territory. This happens because the U.S. can utilize those resources more efficiently then the countries where the resources came from. We then sell the finished goods for a profit.
The U.S., obviously, does import a lot of things, but it is still the world’s largest exporter. We import things that can be made more cheaply abroad precisely so that we can invest more resources into making things that we make more efficiently in the United States.
Protectionism will mean that we will no longer be able to import things made with fewer resources from abroad and will have to make them using more resources here. That inevitably means that we will have to make fewer things that the Unites States is best at making, which will lower our standard of living, lead to a net job loss, and have a snowball effect on everything else – a complete disaster. Protectionism is one of the fundamental causes of the great depression.
Actually, I’m oversimplifying, it is sometimes better to obtain things made with more resources abroad than domestically if it allows us to make more things that have a higher resource markup in trade value – it’s called comparitive advantage.
So Forest, protectionism would have lessened the degree to which our industrial base was shipped overseas, but at the cost of preventing the growth of “high markup” technology and research jobs here.
We can never return to what once was because the Unites States doesn’t make a majority of the world’s manufactured goods anymore. Nothing can change that, and nothing could have prevented it.
I have one major issue of apostasy with libertarian thought, I think the gold standard, or “gold by fiat” as I call it, is as much hooey as the Federal Reserve.

Completely free trade among nations is one of the reasons for the problems we have today. It’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle now that the economic crisis is upon us but in the future free trade needs to be scaled back.