Yeah well, fuck David Ricardo(, it’s obvious that we should buy&produce locally, his counter-intuitive results are only valid from a consumer viewpoint, not taking into account the jobs created, the taxes collected by the state, the more secondary enterprises benefiting indirectly from a good economic health, …), he was only used to justify a neo-colonialist “free trade” locking “poor”(exploited) countries into selling raw materials, as well as selling the ownership of their companies/mines/‘natural resources’, etc.
Their invaluable ressources were formed over (hundreds of )millions of years and are now sold over a few decades at a very low price set by the market according to the competition(, which isn’t the case for the more advanced manufactured products with less competition, such as selling planes instead of t-shirts).
So fuck David Ricardo, and these countries should ABSOLUTELY agree together to form an economic(&military because coups would follow,) alliance to raise in a concerted manner the prices of their raw materials, who should be at the very least 10, if not 100, times higher, and then use that money to manufacture these objects themselves. But they won’t, tsk, so w/e.
D.Trump is right in his desire to get back american companies in the u.s.a., even if he only did so once he stopped benefiting from it, the u.s. is too powerful to be oppressed for such decisions, unlike :

• Haiti in the 1980-1990s, who tried to protect its rice, but the unholy trinity forced them to give up on that measure, and Miami’s rice quickly took over, assholes ;
• Before the 1980s, Ghana produced its own clothes, but because of the western SAPs, they were forced to buy clothes from Europe and Asia and lost their textile industry ;
• In Argentina during the 2000s, Kirchner also tried some protectionnism like China, but as usual the unholy trinity came to order people around, the US, EU, and Japan added to the criticism of the WHO, and commercial pressures forced them to change their mind ;
• Tanzania also tried to do the same for its agriculture, etc.

I won’t forget that the People’s Republic of China was the only non-western aligned country to ever emerge since the colonization(, South Korea and Japan’s rise were only strategic, we helped them at our expense like Israel or Taiwan), and also one of the only ones who refused to follow western advices/orders(, i still consider them protectionnism even if they complied — unwillingly in 1842, 1858, 1860, … ; willingly in the 1980s — with our demands on tariffs, because they :

• subsidized their economy ;
• ‘obtained, through explicit demands of real partnerships unlike the more submissive(trusting?) global South,’&‘are now improving upon’ western technologies, as well as creating new ones(, they were faster) ;
• had reglementations such as forbidding foreign investments in some sectors past a certain percentage ;
• favored local companies for state projects ;
• …
  They’ve demonstrated the unprecedented success of their system/‘set of conditions’, and should be imitated by the Global South if it’s indeed better/‘validated by these last decades’. And the chinese civilization has only just started to marvel us if you also like techno-scientific discoveries).

Fuck Ricardo.

More arguments here, among many books.