When was the last time we had a genuinely protectionist president?

[bluestateguy]

As in a president who believed in trade rules and tariffs to protect jobs.

Herbert Hoover, maybe? Republicans used to be the pro-tariff protectionist party. In the 19th century if you were for high tariffs, you were a Republican. Democrats, in response to their Southern agricultural base, tended to favor lower tariffs.

But it seems in the last 80 years that presidents of both parties tend to favor free and unrestricted trade. Maybe it's a presidential legacy thing: presidents want to be known for having opened up trade to other countries; they figure that will win them more praise from historians than the jobs that were cost along the way.

[True Blue Door]

1. This gets into some pretty nuanced territory.

There's good protectionism and there's bad protectionism. Hoover's method definitely hurt the economy more than it helped, and FDR was wise to reopen trade.

Good protection is restrictions on capital flight, while not restricting trade in goods.

Capital has to be geographically immobile for comparative advantage to exist at all. Otherwise it isn't even trade - it's just plain market unification where money flows downhill to wherever the lowest costs are, and completely abandons everywhere else.

[hifiguy]

3. Capital flight.

You just said the secret word and the duck is gonna come down.

That is almost entirely what TPP is about. NAFTA too. Their primary purpose is twofold - gut local/national pro-customer regulation and make it as frictionless as possible for capital to decamp to places with Third World or worse regulatory systems and worker rights,

[cali]

2. It's not either/or- and very, very few people are advocating protectionism/isolationism

And tariffs are a tiny part of trade barriers. I am currently reading the USTR 2015 Report on Trade Barriers. You wouldn't believe what the USTR considers trade barriers- if you're interested enough, you can read my op on the report.

no offense, but your argument isn't relevant to the discussion of current ftas and trade practices.

[pampango]

4. Hoover for sure. FDR was the father of global low-tariff trade and

was so effective at creating the infrastructure to support it that protectionism has not returned.

In the 19th and early 20th century, Americans hated the revenue system based on tariffs. It protected American monopolies that their raised prices. That's why Democrats were the low-tariff party.

The 16th Amendment created the income tax which allowed revenues to come more from the rich rather from tariffs.