>>811710Free trade is good and has always been good. It is a good thing if Dems and DSA types, despite their general incompetence, are at least sound on this question.
>>811720The best theoretical argument for them is that you can protect domestic industries and allow them to build up strength to compete internationally. It is, however, mostly a dumb one which in the modern age is based on prestige considerations. (e.g. thinking there's a meaningful difference between making Japanese cars in the US, and making Ford cars in the US.)
In actuality the best way to develop industry is not to focus on meeting domestic demand, but to focus on exports. You can force miserable products onto the domestic market if they have no alternatives (see India making 1950s British cars decades later) but an export product has to be something people actually want to buy. (e.g. Early South Korean cars were exported at a loss because the government forced the firms in question to export, then, seeking profit, they progressively cut production costs and improved quality until they were profitable. At all points they were offering a car people would
choose to buy at its price point.)
>>811726Tariffs couldn't have saved British coal. First because British coal was not killed on fundamentally economic grounds (coal mining operations broke even, it lost money due to pension and land damage payments… which had to be paid even after British Coal was shut down) but basically as a political move to crush enemies of the government. A much smarter approach all-around would've been the managed wind-down of the industry by cutting new hiring and letting existing employees age out, only making redundancy payments and firing people when there weren't enough to keep a mine open.
Secondly, and arguably more importantly (because it's independent of these political considerations), because of North Sea oil and gas. Britain had a huge domestic energy supply was more cost competitive with coal, hence why by the 1990s, energy generation shifted dramatically over to gas. Even in a world where coal imports were tariffed to be more expensive than domestic
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