The United States has all kinds of tariff and other subsidies for key industries. Foreign airlines and shipping companies are literally blocked from providing domestic US services. (That's also why all major US cruise ships touch a foreign port in their journey). Steel and autos and much of agriculture are also heavily protected.

These are all anti-consumer and bad public policy.

It doesn't disallow them but it discourages them - the ruling class of the Western world has been on the side of globalization for many decades now (still is) and that is really what is in question.

As to who, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30458506

And "direction" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your statement about China. They were, and still are, very protectionist of their internal market, using official and unofficial means.

Not to imply western countries are exempt - they also made (and make) use of protectionism in growing their industries. Only after industries matured, would the market be opened, and economic propaganda launched how unrestricted trade was the only way to prosperity (and, by pure chance, this would give the now globally-competitive industries new export markets). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism#In_the_United_St...:

Alexander Hamilton, the first United States Secretary of the Treasury, was of the view, as articulated most famously in his "Report on Manufactures", that developing an industrialized economy was impossible without protectionism because import duties are necessary to shelter domestic "infant industries" until they could achieve economies of scale. The industrial takeoff of the United States occurred under protectionist policies 1816–1848 and under moderate protectionism 1846–1861, and continued under strict protectionist policies 1861–1945.

In other words, protectionism has a proven track record of developing economies, while unrestricted free trade is only theoretically able to accomplish this. Of course economists are immune to empirical proof - from that same wikipedia article:

There is a broad consensus among economists that protectionism has a negative effect on economic growth and economic welfare, while free trade and the reduction of trade barriers has a positive effect on economic growth.

This was like 5-10years ago, I developed a bug reporting app and developed a form of encryption which was uncrackable. Now I'm not qualified in anything, never even went to Uni, but what should have taken 6weeks with the UK Dept BIS, took like more than that and then got denied so I shut the business down I'd set up for it.

Dont have the source code anymore or anything and its not ever going to happen now.

When I say it was uncrackable, it was based loosely on code books which were used in ww2, which is something I subsequently read about later on in the news.

...Because making sure businesses in economies plan for that sort of thing is generally something that you have to be a non-transient actor to ensure.

Businesses/corps come and go ... the Nation of $nation only tends to do so on the next timescale up. When their actually looking out for systemic blindspots no one else is, and not pandering to the elite.

Businesses also need to have customers. No clothes maker was forced to manufacture in poor countries, but the alternative was to simply stop existing since insufficient customers are willing to pay the price premium for purely American made clothes. Hence the only solution would have been legislation forcing domestic manufacturing.

Per Einstein: 'A model should be as simple as it can be but no simpler'. I think people tend to overcomplicate things than oversimplify. A true understanding of something can be hinted by being able to explain it in a simple way.