You are citing the tariffs out of context. The issues with China revolve around unfair trade barriers which includes patents, copyrights, and in general the theft of intellectual property. Additionally, China "cheats" at lots of other things which socialists, including unions, do in fact hate; things such as selling steel below cost, or paying workers low wages compared to union scale in this country. We capitalists tend to dismiss this as a case where the Chinese are unwittingly giving away their national treasure ... but in the end, we are left without the capability to produce steel ... or cars ... or cell phones ... or solar panels .... and on and on.
This is a very tangled web.
In this context, tariffs become a tool in the battle for a level playing field. and probably our most flexible tool; certainly one which we can manipulate on a sort of tit-for-tat basis.
It paints a very pretty free-market picture to imagine a world where goods move freely among trading partners and all of the notions of "Relative Advantage" prevail but that is not reality. The Chinese are cheating around every corner. They are competing in our markets while maintaining the values of a socialist system and therein lies the rub.
In this fight over fair and free trade, we need a tool to fight their manipulative tendencies. Tariffs seem to be an attention getter.
