Protectionists murder the market and then scorn consumers for being orphans. Fair trade is based on the doctrine that producers have rights and consumers have duties. Fair trade assumes that the consumer's freedom of choice is an injustice to the producer. The soul of protectionism is that if a company cannot stand on its own two feet, government should force its customers to carry it. Protectionism is a Dred Scot policy for consumers, the federal government promising not to let American consumers escape from American businesses who want to charge them higher prices.
Protectionism means shackling some people in order to enrich other people.
Government cannot restrict trade without redistributing income. Tariffs, as a government tax for private benefit, are either fair or unfair. Either the government has a moral justification for imposing a 7.4 percent surcharge on wooden clothespins imports for the benefit of U.S. clothespin makers, or it does not. U.S. trade policy implicitly assumes that fair trade can be achieved by giving certain officials unlimited power to ordain how many of each foreign good other Americans may buy, and exactly what surcharge they must pay. But the mathematical precision of American tariffs and quotas makes a mockery of any reasonable concept of fairness.