>> Trade barriers, in the sense of protective tariffs to prevent outside manufactures selling cheaply in your domestic market, can be very, very, very good for industrial development.
> Not really.
Yes really, though not always. (The word "only" when talking about who benefits is a little to coarse a generalization...) The tradeoff is between cheap goods now and capitalization (building of factories, etc) for later; often, without tariffs, the local industry would never even be able to get off the ground to where it is competitive. And if "the protected" contribute to the overall economy (a big if, I grant) then the country as a whole benefits. It is how the US did, how Japan did/ does it, sort of how China does it, etc, etc. And you are right that too much protection can make industries less competitive ... except when it doesn't... Like all tradeoffs, there are tradeoffs.
The complexity of human society defies abstract reasoning, and begs for actual example. I don't see any grounding in actual knowledge of history in your arguments (though (1) I grant that too much protectionism is just as bad as too little, and (2) you are probably better grounded in fact than your arguments).
I think I could probably agree to some degree with an argument that short term trade barriers in emerging market segments may be useful as a tool to encourage investment.
Even that is dangerous because of the tendency of the emerging industry to rely on them.
An alternate model is that followed by Thailand and its car industry. The Thais aggressively pushed for and signed unilateral free trade agreements with a number of post-industrial and industrial economies and then leveraged those trade agreements as a tool to encourage large investments in heavy industry.
The fact that cars imported from Thailand attract no import duty in a large number of countries has made them a very attractive investment target for companies like Honda who have since built factories there.
> The complexity of human society defies abstract reasoning, and begs for actual example. I don't see any grounding in actual knowledge of history in your arguments (though (1) I grant that too much protectionism is just as bad as too little, and (2) you are probably better grounded in fact than your arguments).
The complexity of human society is an argument in favour of freer markets. Knowledge about resources and demands is distributed extremely widely and no one actor can gather and react to even a miniscule fraction of it, compared to the totality.
Protectionism, amongst other things, is an act of central planning. Those who decide what to protect and what to leave open are making guesses about the current and future economy which might or might not be true. Given the poor record of central planning in every form it has been tried (most famously Gosplan), I would prefer to let a distributed dynamic optimising system create an approximate solution to an incomplete-knowledge problem than to wait for a single actor provide a perfect single solution.
> Not really.
Yes really, though not always. (The word "only" when talking about who benefits is a little to coarse a generalization...) The tradeoff is between cheap goods now and capitalization (building of factories, etc) for later; often, without tariffs, the local industry would never even be able to get off the ground to where it is competitive. And if "the protected" contribute to the overall economy (a big if, I grant) then the country as a whole benefits. It is how the US did, how Japan did/ does it, sort of how China does it, etc, etc. And you are right that too much protection can make industries less competitive ... except when it doesn't... Like all tradeoffs, there are tradeoffs.
The complexity of human society defies abstract reasoning, and begs for actual example. I don't see any grounding in actual knowledge of history in your arguments (though (1) I grant that too much protectionism is just as bad as too little, and (2) you are probably better grounded in fact than your arguments).