The US chooses to allow unlimited competition from China. China allows limited competition from US companies with their nascent industries.

Switzerland is a fascinating example of a country which almost entirely bans foreign competition in anything they can reasonably produce domestically. Costs are high, but wages are higher.

This was probably working while the Swiss people were working and buying their products, but in Zurich Swiss people do banking and non-Swiss people engineering (and the number of non-Swiss people grow exponentially, now maybe 1% of people in Zurich is a Googler). They usually go to the German border for weekend shopping instead of buying the expensive Swiss products.

Do you have some references on how the bans work in Switzerland? I live in EU and have never heard about Swiss having some parasitic relationship with EU (meaning export to EU is ok, but import is not).

This article was on HN recently, and it does a pretty good job of explaining how we did this to ourselves by making the dollar the global reserve currency:

https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

To be fair, American wages, outside of the bottom percentile jobs, are much higher than their counterparts in the developed world.