How are zero-rate imports better for everyone?
The consumer saves money. The government loses sales tax revenue, loses income tax revenue from the people that could have made it locally, has lower employment rates.
Buying locally doesn't always make sense, but often you can make an economic argument that paying slightly more for something made and sold locally is better for the consumer too.
9/10 times this isn't correct. If you live in an urban capital, sure. If you live in somewhere more rural, oftentimes the only local makers in the area will be rather terrible, and a large company will have a better warranty almost all of the time.
> The consumer saves money. The government loses sales tax revenue, loses income tax revenue from the people that could have made it locally, has lower employment rates.
The consumer has a higher chance of the product they bought having support in three years.
> How are zero-rate imports better for everyone?
More opportunities for the consumer to buy things, more incentive for the company to entice customers with benefits, government isn't "everyone," and they still benefit by more net units sold because they can tax on-sale still.
But I think we're looking at this from different aspects. I was considering self-imports (eg Alibaba, some Ebay/Amazon sellers). You're considering big-box-Chinesium-imports vs something made by a local mom-and-pop. You might get better support from the big box longevity but that might be more reason for protectionist policy, not less.
If you compare buying imported crap from a big-box to importing it yourself, you're paying the big-box for your "free" warranty. They build it into the price. But 30-50% of your cash is ending up offshore with no benefit to your own economy.
That's the brilliant part of free trade—in total, the amount gained by exporting will generally equal or be greater than if you were to tax on imports.
Lessening consumer options is almost never a good thing.
There's a bit more to "support" than a warranty. For example: if a person buys a piece of software, they should reasonably expect it to last until they move onto an operating system incompatible with it, no? What if an API the program uses is deprecated/removed for security reasons, ala Microsoft Gadgets.
There's also the problem of long-term customer support. Your average user uses CS at least a few times over the course of the product's lifespan.
A person who lives in Estonia or Poland doesn't even have a company creating say, a smartphone. They aren't competing with anything, so why punish both the company and consumer for getting a necessity in the modern age, a smartphone?
Free trade isn't some right, it's just better for everyone involved