The US offered the EU a zero tariff trade agreement for all goods twice in the past three years and both times the EU turned it down seeing how the EU is screwing the US on tariffs. The EU is a protection racket.
I agree. We even have inter-state limits on the production of some essential items, like food production etc. EU is a confederation of wildly different states, some are so strong that they could wipe the weaker ones economically in a year - just by trading without protection for the poor. Protection of the poor is one of the building blocks of the EU.
The EU is a protection hell (just next to France, nobody can even compute how much are their farmers subsidized), but thinking of it, how could we keep it together without protection? The EU can't withstand the US version of free trade, so can't many other states. There's a lesson in this story about cutting taxes - the US should taste it's own trade policy. Like standing up to the free competition from China. They've (the US) created it. Greed was more than love for thy neighbour. Now they're facing it from the other side. They've created an
unscrupulous Frankenstein out of China.
I don't have anything against the US(except for the foreign policy as commented by Noam Chomsky), quite the opposite, we should cooperate as much as possible. But free trade ain't for us, we're protected by trade barriers in the European fort. As long as we can produce our high quality goods and sell it to the domestic market, it works. Free trade (meaning with no barriers for trade) accelerates the race to the bottom, eventually killing all the local technology centers. Examples - Lenovo buying laptop division from IBM, Lenovo bying mobile division from Motorola, etc...
Just FYI, we're producing
CooliPi, the mammoth heatsink and coolercase for the Raspberry Pi 4. We are proud to manufacture it in EU, using only connectors from a German company (which eventually manufactures in China). The price is quite high thanks to its monster size, and second - we don't outsource it to Asia. It's hard to convince people to buy something of high quality/high price, when they see ultra cheap stuff on Amazon and daily buy from Wall-Mart. Quality disappears along with falling prices undercut by (free trade) competition. And manufacturers of high-end stuff need low-end too, to pay for the expenses, and to have acces to the crowd of customers.