>> The U.S. president has effectively discarded modern economics, reembraced crude protectionism, and, like the mercantilists of the pre-Adam Smith era, appears

>> The U.S. president has effectively discarded modern economics, reembraced crude protectionism, and, like the mercantilists of the pre-Adam Smith era, appears to see trade as a zero-sum game Trump is right. Almost all business activity today is a zero-sum game. Americans have all the abilities and skills to produce everything they need on their own. If (hypothetically) the US were to start banning foreign companies, new US companies which are just as good would pop up in their place. This would create better, high-paying jobs for Americans and more opportunities for entrepreneurs and technologists. This is true for pretty much any developed country with respect to foreign goods and services. For example, if France blocked Facebook, within a matter of weeks, better alternatives would pop up to cater for the French market. This is not speculation BTW, it's pretty much what happened in China with respect to all major US tech companies. China knows exactly what kind of zero-sum game they're playing. Ability is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is human attention. Governments have to leverage their laws and regulations to maintain control over the attention of their citizens so that they can focus it to benefit local businesses. Free markets only make sense at the small scale; for example, I'm a builder and I want to focus all my time and energy on building houses so that I can gain more experience to fine-tune my skills and become more efficient over time - but I have a problem: While I'm busy becoming an expert in construction, I need to eat bread to survive... The solution to this problem is a free market; it will allow me to use the money that I earn from building houses to buy bread from a baker (who is an expert in baking). The efficiency gains here are obvious. When you look at the same problem at a global scale, it doesn't make sense because, taken as a whole, a country (especially one with a large population) can focus on many things at once whilst being an expert at all of them. Being really good in one area does not prevent a country from also being really good in a different area. Applying a microeconomic solution (in this case, a free market) to a macroeconomic problem doesn't work. It's like if you were a plumber and your kitchen sink was leaking and instead of fixing it yourself (which would take 5 minutes and cost you $0), you decide to call another plumber to come to your house and fix it (which would take 1 hour of travel time extra and cost you $100). It makes no sense. If you have the skills to do something on your own, and you have an unlimited ability to multi-task you'd have to be an idiot to pay someone else to do it.