It is merely that I do not believe that workers in the First World ought to be forced into cutthroat wage competition against political prisoner slave laborers in China or Vietnam, or seven-year-olds in Mexico or Indonesia. I do not believe that free nations should trade with totalitarian regimes at all--this is not only because it is morally unacceptable to legitimize totalitarian regimes by having relations with them, not only because totalitarian regimes generally have little with which to engage in trade except a surplus of concentration camp slave labor (meaning that the net flow of wealth will be out of my society, rather than into it, as it should be), but also because, as a practical matter, Stalinist regimes are one and all hostile to my own free society, and "free trade" with them means a hemorrhage of hard currency flowing out of my society into the coffers of governments that hate us and will surely spend the money on weapons (Communist China comes to mind here). I believe that I have a moral right to exist without being forced into merciless wage competition against lao gai concentration camp slave laborers, a competition that can only end with my wages and standard of living being equalized with theirs (incidentally, it is not only manual laborers who are suffering this fate, but also millions of American technical workers who have watched all the computer programming and information technology jobs vanish to India in the past three years--no doubt it will be engineers and scientists next).
I believe that under the social contract a government's first obligation is to its own productive citizens. Surely one of the core values of conservatism is that the productive have the first claim on the wealth that their labor creates. I see no moral difference between one parasite and the next. Drug-addled welfare recipients far outnumber billionaire bankers who demand that my tax money be used to back their Third World investment schemes (and bail them out when they fail), but the latter may well do more damage to my society.
It is, I suppose, fashionable to call this stance "protectionist" today, as if that were an evil word, but I always thought that those who have the good fortune to live in free societies had something called a "social contract" with their rulers: a quid pro quo under the terms of which the rulers protect the lives and interests of the ruled in exchange for their loyalty.
I will not make the hysterical and ridiculous claims that those on the far left make; I do not believe either that I live in a fascist police state or that the social contract has been destroyed. But I do believe that a very powerful, very wealthy, very tiny minority here is attempting to do great damage to the social contract, by demanding that the government allow them to force American workers into cutthroat wage competition against six-year-olds in Bangladesh (a competition that can only result in higher unemployment in the US, more poverty, lower wages, and higher crime, all the inescapable results of exporting hard currency) so that the few can profit at the expense of the many. I am only 50 km from the smoldering ruins of Detroit, Michigan, and have seen what "free trade" has wrought upon the people of that unfortunate city.