Please stop and consider that trade is a very complex situation with dependencies on many things, human psychology being one incredibly important but not very obvious one.

Turning a complex system into a binary, as you are doing, is not an optimal form of analysis. It introduces significant risk, because you are constraining your ability to consider possible outcomes of various policy decisions. Furthermore, you are basing your beliefs on recorded human history, which is an incredibly small sample size, and you are only looking at the average outcome. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and luck in human history, but the tone of your writing is that you have an utterly perfect understanding and indisputable conclusion.

At the very least, can you consider the possibility that while free trade is undoubtedly superior on average, that there can be negative individual outcomes in smaller time or regional frames?

EDIT: Also don't forget:

a) History is written by the victor

b) A lot of the studies you may cite (or other may use against you) are written by imperfect human beings, may be not perfectly correct or comprehensive, may contain bias (may be sponsored by someone looking for a particular conclusion) if not outright lies (lies, damned lies, and statistics and all that), and are not guaranteed to play out the same under different conditions.

The above would help explain why there are differences of opinion on such matters as this, and many other things. There seems to be this incredibly pervasive sentiment on both sides (yes, even yours!) of the political divide particularly in Western cultures, that the Ultimate Truth is blatantly obvious, if only the other side wasn't too uneducated to see it. This style of thinking strikes me as very ironic.

EDIT (to Rory, as I am throttled):

> I'm happy to consider exceptions to that rule or reasons to believe it is flawed.

Based on your tone and words, you certainly don't seem to have an open mind on the matter. I don't mean that as a snipe, I mean it is a fact that unfortunately you may find offensive. Keep in mind, people aren't perfect, and you are a person.

Above you said: "The effects of the Smoot-Hawley Act as well as a hundred years of economic consensus are quite clear on this: protectionism is bad."

You didn't say protectionism can be bad, or tends to be bad, you said it is bad. This is the very point of my criticism, it is an absolutist, one-dimensional conclusion on an incredibly complex system, based on a tiny sample size. If this statement offends you, you should stop and think about that for a little while, and I mean that sincerely and as non-offensively as possible.

> However, there is substantial theoretical and empirical work to support this point. Are you proposing an alternative or just handwavingly dismissing it as "science is wrong sometimes"? Unless you'd like to point to evidence that protectionism is good or at least a theoretical framework under which it can be good, the claim is little different from "evolution is just a theory, why don't you consider alternatives?"

Based on a disciplined reading what I've written, without subconscious interpretation and extrapolation, can you try to think of how this statement might be less than perfect? I could easily point out some flaws in this statement, but that tends not to be an effective way of communicating on these topics. Are you able to see any flaws in it, at all? (And, feel more than free to point out logical errors in my thinking, I encourage it!. But in good faith, before doing that please address my reasonable points.)