> it's a good idea to retain a meaningful industrial base (eg domestic steel manufacturing). Whenever we "protect" one industry, that has negative downstream e

> it's a good idea to retain a meaningful industrial base (eg domestic steel manufacturing). Whenever we "protect" one industry, that has negative downstream effects on all our other industries that depend on it. In the case of steel, the fact that we protected steel manufacturers made our own auto manufacturers much less internationally competitive than they would otherwise have been, because US automakers were paying twice as much for their steel as companies in Japan and Taiwan were paying for theirs. Similarly, the US nearly killed Apple Computer at one point when it tried to "protect" the domestic semiconductor industry, making locally-assembled macs artificially more expensive than foreign-assembled clones due to the artificially-inflated price of imported DRAM chips. The best way to "retain a meaningful industrial base" is let our companies compete on the world market.