First of all, I am NOT an economist. But I think that when a country imposes heavy tariffs, as the United States is doing to China and other nations, those tariffs hurt all the wrong people. Or maybe they just hurt EVERYBODY.
Follow along with me in this hypothetical example:
China makes more steel than it needs
A US company needs to buy steel in order to build a skyscraper.
A Chinese company offers a better price than any US company does.
The US government decides to impose stiff tariffs on steel imported from China, presumably so that more American workers will have jobs making steel in America.
But wait, China may lose some business but the buyer of the steel in the US now pays more to purchase the steel he needs locally and so the price of building the skyscraper will go up. Economic development may be stunted.
And of course China will find some US goods on which to impose import tariffs. So everything ends up being more expensive and we have inflation which hurts the consumer most.
I grew up believing that the market would balance prices fairly and it was not the job of government to impose protective tariffs, the profits from which end up in the coffers of the government and farthest away from the consumer.
Am I missing something here?