THROUGHOUT HISTORY, nations have tried to improve their economies by engineering a surplus of exports over imports. This was accomplished through a wide variety of tariffs on imports, non-tariff barriers, export subsidies and other governmentally-imposed conditions of trade.

The combination of such strategies was known as “mercantilism.” The objective was to create a trade surplus, with all the benefits that creates for an economy. Today the dirty secret of U.S. trade policy is that despite calling itself “free trade” it is really what can more accurately be called “reverse mercantilism.” That is, the true policy is to maximize imports over exports, to promote foreign outsourcing by manufacturing elsewhere and bringing goods back here as cheaply as possible.

As such, we are the first country in the history of the universe to pursue such a policy, the first to proclaim that a trade deficit is a good thing.

How do we know that the true U.S. policy is import maximization? We cannot learn it from the proponents of our trade policy, because they constantly hide behind the label of “free trade,” and attempt to silence all critics by name-calling.

Anyone who dares to question the wisdom of this new reverse mercantilism policy is immediately branded as that worst species of economic Neanderthal, a “protectionist.” Although we cannot deduce their true purposes from listening to their words, we can do so by reverse engineering from their deeds.

It is what they do that displays their true motives. Run down each of the governmentally imposed conditions of trade and the import maximization goal becomes abundantly clear. Start with tariffs. We have lowered our own tariffs down to an overall average of 1.3 percent, much the world’s lowest.

Meanwhile our exports face an average worldwide tariff of about 40 percent. Any Econ 101 student familiar with the classic “guns and butter” lecture knows what will happen. When you tax guns at 1.3 percent and butter at 40 percent, you end up with a misallocation of resources different from the free-market outcome: too many guns, not enough butter.

Thus that our trade deficit of imports far in excess of exports is no surprise, but rather an economically engineered outcome. And, it is definitely not the “free-trade” outcome. Non-tariff barriers work the same way. Our import maximizers have insisted we have very little, compared to a witheringly ingenious array against our exports around the world.

Then there is the matter of border-adjusted taxes. There are 136 nations that impose value-added-taxes on our exports and subsidize their own exports to us with VAT rebates—a double whammy in the range of a net 40 percent disadvantage to the U.S. The U.S. uses neither border-adjusted taxes on imports, nor border-adjusted tax subsidies on exports. Why do we insist other nations enact intellectual-property-protection laws and not environmental and labor conditions?

The explanation is that the former are important for good foreign outsourcing platforms, but the latter are actually hindrances. The “world’s most admired CEO,” Jack Welch, the retired chief of General Electric, once said that the best place to put a factory is on a barge. This is the essence of the import-maximization strategy: Place foreign outsourcing where production conditions are most favored, then bring it back to the U.S. with as little “friction” as possible.

The list goes on and on. Other examples point to the same conclusion. It is time the American people were told the truth: the immense trade deficit that is doing so much harm to our nation today and threatens its tomorrow is not “the inevitable result of globalization” in a “free-trade” context.

It is the deliberately self-inflicted result of import maximization, of reverse mercantilism, ruthlessly carried out under a false guise.

It is true that old-fashioned “mercantilism” has been rejected by economists, but only because it is so good a strategy. Pursuing the advantages of a trade surplus is not sustainable if other countries all try to engage in the same “beggar my neighbor” strategy. But no economist has ever lauded a policy of deliberately “beggaring myself.” How did the United States become so smart as to be the first nation in history to discover that a policy of reverse mercantilism is beneficial?