[rory096]

>Turning a complex system into a binary, as you are doing, is not an optimal form of analysis. It introduces significant risk, because you are constraining your ability to consider possible outcomes of various policy decisions. Furthermore, you are basing your beliefs on recorded human history, which is an incredibly small sample size, and you are only looking at the average outcome.

I'm happy to consider exceptions to that rule or reasons to believe it is flawed. (Certainly there are game theoretical reasons to impose protection in the short term in the hopes of coercing the other party into agreeing to lower overall protection in the long term. Though all indications are that the administration gives lip service to that at best — they are fundamentally opposed to free trade.)

However, there is substantial theoretical and empirical work to support this point. Are you proposing an alternative or just handwavingly dismissing it as "science is wrong sometimes"? Unless you'd like to point to evidence that protectionism is good or at least a theoretical framework under which it can be good, the claim is little different from "evolution is just a theory, why don't you consider alternatives?"

[mistermann]

I added some comments for you above.