Investigations by both the International Trade Commission and the federal Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements presume that it is a bad thing if foreign products are priced lower than American products. Helms apparently believes that the U.S. Congress should have the right and power to give the market to whom it chooses. To talk of giving the market is, in reality, to talk of giving away the dollars of anyone who must depend on that market. To talk of imports' fair share of the U.S. market means to talk of U.S. producers' fair share of American workers' paychecks. For politicians to allocate market share is to treat consumers like serfs who can be freely traded by their lords.
Protectionism means an automatic partial expropriation of the buyers' dollars.
American trade policy presumes that an exchange between an American and a foreign citizen is fundamentally morally different than trade between two Americans. Because Nova Scotia never joined the other British colonies in the 1776-1783 revolution, the Commerce Department judged a Canadian company guilty of dumping groundfish in its sales in Boston. Because Britain and the United States agreed in 1849 that the 49th parallel would be the boundary between the western United States and Canada, the Commerce Department condemned as unfairly priced raspberries from Saskatchewan sold in Seattle. If one company charges different prices in Vancouver, Washington, and Miami, Florida, that is fine. But if another company charges exactly the same different prices in Vancouver, Canada, and Miami, Florida, the U.S. Commerce Department rushes out to collect a few hundred thousand pages of documents to find out what went wrong.