Not innately. However, protectionism strongly encourages modeling the economy in adversarial and conservationist (status quo-preserving) terms. It's the same lo

Not innately. However, protectionism strongly encourages modeling the economy in adversarial and conservationist (status quo-preserving) terms. It's the same logic that people use when talking about how immigrants are crowding them out of the labor market. There's a kernel of truth, but taken too far it becomes destructive to pursue. The end result of protectionism taken to its conclusion is autarky, which has some highly notable and horrible failures, especially in more contemporary times. The protectionist agent is, of course, the state. And contrary to many social critics who shriek of "market failures," there are also corresponding government failures that are often far more disastrous, as public choice theorists have written on the subject, for instance. This along with the problems of state power that we all know too well. Autarkies necessarily have high levels of central planning that lead to such issues as undersupply, allocative inefficiencies from distorted signaling, more frequent rationing, shortages incurred by price controls and high amounts of idle or unproductive labor with possible frantic/erratic production cycles ("employed unemployment").