You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...
Fun part is, the USA and some other nations of 1947 realized that free markets needed some kind of "universal arbiter" to curb such shenanigans and brought the World Trade Organization (originally GATT, WTO since 1995, not affiliated with the UN) on the way. Most of you probably heard of it.
Virtually all the world's nations are voluntary members. Sure, many criticize it for being a tool of the USA and other western nations to browbeat other nations into shape (e.g. China). There is merit to this claim, but obviously it is not so clear-cut. However, it can't be denied that the WTO has been a tremendously useful tool for the USA and its allies to shape world trade. Somehow the 45th president of the USA thought the USA would get the short end of the stick here and started to obstruct WTO proceedings in 2018. The WTO has lost a lot of its influence since then, removing a powerful tool from the USA's arsenal.
I think this is the root of the disconnect. A lot of people say "wait, Americans wanted X because it's a useful tool for projecting American power" - whether X is the petrodollar, the WTO, free trade, whatever. But largely it was one segment of Americans that wanted and benefited from it.
As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.
Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.
These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?
Please, give me some credit. Who assumes that any nation's population, or any sufficiently large group of people, really, is a homogeneous, uniform, or monolithic in their opinions? I certainly don't.
Sure, but the point is that a wide spectrum of people, particularly on the left, believed so strongly that WTO was such a net negative for the average American they were willing to violently riot over it.
So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.
> You may think this is fair, while others disagree.
I said nothing about fairness. What I said is that every government and some point or another makes use of protectionist economic measures.
> for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories
This just doesn't happen, at least not for the reasons you mentioned.
China is a good example, as it gives many forms of subsidies to its industries. Other countries respond with a mix of measures to protect the industries they care about.
You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...