If we were to enact a tariff on foreign-made smartphones that was so high that they couldn't compete with domestically-made smartphones, the smartphone manufacturers in China and the rest of the far east would just sell their phones across the rest of the world, where they would out-compete our phones on price (initially). Our domestic manufacturers would have a smaller market and less access to materials and technical advancements, causing our phones to become inferior in quality as well as overpriced. And that would eventually hurt our people and our entire economy as well, because we won't be able to enjoy the technological advancements and lower-cost goods that the rest of the world is benefiting from.

The Soviet Union used to have a pretty self-contained, very protectionist economy, and the low-quality of their goods was a standing joke in the US for decades. That's what protectionism gets you if you're not the sole manufacturer or sole market for a product.

Manufacture IPhones in China to sell to the rest of the world.

I bet that whats Apple is going to do.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/17/515850029/episo...

Even with the tariff incentives, the demand within the country wasn't enough to cover the economies of scale to keep manufacturing costs effective.

It even worked for the United States. Protectionism was a major component of our policy approach toward industrialization.

Protectionism as a mechanism for supporting the development of domestic capabilities is, historically, a well-justified policy position.

And if you look to highly protectionist economies today, you'll find mostly developing economies.

> Why not?

1. Most importantly, protectionism as a mechanism for inflating wages and/or spurring job growth in an already developed economy isn't nearly as well-tested an approach as examples of protectionism in America's past. Historic examples of US protectionism had the end goal of boosting domestic labor productivity. Modern protectionism risks doing exactly the opposite.

2. The diffuse benefits of free trade must be weighed against the more localized costs of free trade. It's a difficult calculus, but it shouldn't be ignored. Cheap stuff at Walmart and Amazon benefits a whole ton of people. Perhaps more importantly, access to foreign markets and capital creates a lot of jobs and wealth domstically. A lot of Americans are employed doing high-paying, high-quality work that is exported globally. (Including a lot of software engineers.)

3. The benefits to labor may be short lived if automation wipes out a lot of manufacturing jobs. In which case we've traded access to foreign markets and capital for maybe 10 years of jobs and a false sense of non-urgency in job re-training.

I don't see any reason todays America would be any different.

So you take less (percentage-wise) from the mega rich than you do from the middle class because large capital doesn't spend a large percent of its capital on consumer goods. That's regressive.

Why don't you go take the money from the rich instead of coming after the middle class? You want the guy who's making $50k a year to pay $200 more for his iPhone and you want the guy making a million a year to do the same. Both of them are only going to own the one iPhone. Straight up regressive.

Your big export industries will be hit, especially those that run at huge economies of scale and are able to dump the produce on other countries devastating their local industry (think big corp farms).

The answer is never as simple as it seems