Other countries slapping tariffs on our products is free trade, er, or something.
Let them hurt themselves.
Why should we harm our economy, simply because some other country is ignorant enough to harm themselves?
You do realize that we are imposing trade sanctions on Russia, right?
Do you know what a trade sanction is?
It is protectionism, imposed from the outside, rather than the inside.
Instead of Canada imposing protectionism on themselves, we impose protectionism on them, by passing a law that we can't sell to Canada.
Now if protectionism worked...... Then right now Russia should be in the middle of an economic boom of world wide proportions. After all, we are preventing Russia from importing all those job destroying products from outside the country.
If protectionism worked... then Russia should be turning into an economic powerhouse.
While the Russian economy isn't in a free-fall slump, it certainly isn't enjoying the steady growth it had in the 2000s.
This is reality. If protectionism is a thing that works, then we would never impose economic sanctions on anyone. We would impose open trade on Russia, and force them to accept imported goods. In fact, we should have forced open free trade on every dictator.
Why would we want to impose economy boosting protectionism on dictators? Like Iran, or Mugabe, or Castro.
Guys you need to come to some consensus at some point. Either protectionism builds the economy, and then you have to ask why we are imposing economy building policies on our enemies..... or protectionism doesn't work, and we should stop destroying our economy with it.
It can't be both.