You make no sense. Germany protects domestic manufacturing to keep their engineers and workers employed, admirable. Who exactly is US trying to keep employed? Please tell me something concrete, don’t use Orwellian terminology like Open markets when you mean Govt Regulated markets.
Without Apple’s introduction of the smart-phone, millions of app development jobs would not exist. Apple’s 30% tax is reducing profits of some developers, the biggest ones are complaining but none of it is gutting the economy, app development is not being shifted overseas because Apple made the cost of development too high. If anything it is the literal opposite, SWE salaries are still increasing because the demand for app developers still outpaces the supply, and people are more than willing to pay 6 figures+ for a good SWE.
The funny thing is your frame has some truth to it, it’s just your entire thinking is hopelessly muddled that you focus on everything that doesn’t matter. There is case, where the government can step in, raise the price of the iPhones to employ more people, cause net consumer harm but still be better for society. That is in iPhone manufacturing where all the jobs have been shifted overseas and no trade worker in US gets employed to make iPhones. This is a real problem, and yet no one in the FTC cares about this, they may not even know this problem exists in their desperate bid to grab power and come up on the front page of NYT with a big win. And what will they achieve? They will let some other app developers make more money, but no offense to 99% of HN, you guys are highly paid and a 30% higher potential margin really doesn’t matter. They will dictate design decisions to a company that is probably 100000x better at design than the FTC is and get fawning reviews from NYT, get invited to talks at universities, maybe even get called to a late night show (has happened before) and that is probably all that matters to them.