I am a law student at the University of Melbourne. My question is: (i) What is protectionism, and (ii) What are the advantages/disadvantages of protectionism for a country?
Protectionism is the belief that a country’s government should limit trade between the country’s citizens and people in other countries. It has a long pedigree, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, though it is mainly associated with the mercantilist writers of the seventeenth century. Advocates of protectionism have used two main arguments to justify it. The first argument is that trade with foreigners exposes people to foreign ideas and ways of acting. If you believe that this exposure is undesirable because it tends to weaken people’s attachment to their own culture, then you will, as Aristotle did in his Politics, argue that the government should restrict trade to protect people from being corrupted by foreigners. This argument depends on how much value you assign to your country’s culture, and therefore, it is not an economic argument even though it has economic consequences. The second argument contends that a country is analogous to a household, and that it becomes wea
