The Trump administration is now moving to put some teeth on its promise to punish "unfair" trade from China and other countries. This week it imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese and South Korean manufacturers of washing machines and solar panels. The move is ill advised on its own, but you can be sure this is just the beginning of renewed debate over the benefits of free trade, with any number of once-passionate opponents of the government "picking winners and losers" rushing to defend the sagacity of "America first" economics.
Rather than wade into a wonky discussion of how trade deficits aren't the bogeyman they're made out to be, I'd like to come at this a different way.
This doesn't mean that capitalists are evil; it means they're human beings. Virtually every profession you can think of has a tendency to dig a moat around itself to protect its interests and defend against competition. A few years ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics came out against affordable health care for children. Retail chains like Walmart and CVS started opening in-store clinics to provide affordable basic health care like vaccinations. The pediatricians rightly saw this as a threat to their monopoly over kids' medical care. Obviously, the pediatricians didn't think they were villains; they simply found rationalizations for why everyone should keep paying them top dollar for stuff that could be done more cheaply.
Similarly, most teachers like kids, but that doesn't stop teachers unions from doing everything they can to protect themselves from competition or accountability. Indeed, unions, by design, are conspiracies against the public to defend the wages and perks of their members. NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) is another manifestation of this phenomenon.