During less economically sophisticated times in the past, nations tended to raise protective barriers during periods of economic downturn to preserve domestic employment and thus domestic economies. In today’s global economy, it is not so easy to say that protectionism necessarily preserves a nation’s economy when the firms operating in that economy are intertwined with operations and markets in many other nations. Remember that the goals in designing any system are optimizing the output of the system, rather than optimizing any subcomponent of that system. In fact, experience has shown that a focus on optimizing any single aspect of a global manufacturing enterprise usually leads to a sub-optimal system performance.
