A agree with some of harpseal's proposals, but he's living in a dream world. As for protectionist trade policies, they exist now. We are merely arguing about degree.
But the bottom line is that the Founding Fathers saw tariffs as revenue-producers. Setting aside the national-security exception that even Adam Smith recognizes, there is no way that one can argue with a straight face that a tariff should be imposed on say, imported malted milk balls, and add that the Founding Fathers would approve of it because candy-manufacturing jobs are at stake.
As for American furniture, my experience that most of it is crap (except for Amish-made). So is Chinese, for that matter. The best furniture (price and quality), in my opinion, comes from Scandanavia and E. Europe, and maybe the Czech and Slovak Republics. Canada is in the process of giving-up the ghost.
There remains some excellent, but expensive, American furniture.
"But the bottom line is that the Founding Fathers saw tariffs as revenue-producers."
No, "revenue-producers" was not the "bottom line" for the Founding Fathers. Steve Farrell explains this more eloquently and clearly.
"The Boston Tea Party: A Reality Check for "Free" Traders"
http://www.newsmax.com/commentarchive.shtml?a=2000/4/11/095631 [... This was done because the emergence of national sovereignty, and a representative government – one free to devise its own trade policy in a mixed world of friends and enemies (a better definition of free trade) – was a more weighty matter than money.
Freedom, lest we forget, includes the liberty to say no to enemies, or to say yes to measures which would protect our liberty and our self sufficiency. If you are dependent on another, and that person hates you and is fixed in his determination to destroy you, how then are you free? Like those controlled by debt, those caught dependent in the presence of enemies will learn first hand a hard lesson about blind trust in theory over reality.
National freedom of choice (or Sovereignty) includes the freedom to choose to sacrifice ourselves economically, if in the long run, that sacrifice makes our liberty more secure. Losing one’s "fortune," spoke John Hancock regarding the Tea Protest, was worth it, "in so good a cause."
Risking "lives and property," added a resolution, is a "risk" we are willing to take. The risk they collectively took did cost lives and property, but it was worth it.
Today, however, the legacy of sacrifice, has been replaced by a generation of spoiled brats, whose psychological fixture is but on one thing; self-interest, and not the enlightened self interest that Adam Smith spoke of, mind you, but the consuming and debasing self interest of Sodom and Gomorrah, Late Rome, and Revolutionary France.
And so, to justify their extreme liberty, they lie, or conveniently misinform themselves about the sources of American Liberty which were founded on Freedom of Trade between states of common history, law, tradition and morality, and of caution, restraint and protection with all others. ...]