If authentic free trade evers looms on the policy horizon, there'll be one sure way to tell. The establishment would react to instituting true free trade about as enthusiastically as it would to repealing the income tax. Genuine free traders consider exports a means of paying for imports, in the same way that goods in general are produced in order to be sold to consumers. But the mercantilists want to privilege the government-business elite at the expense of all consumers, be they domestic or foreign. In negotiations with Japan, for example, be they conducted by Reagan or Bush or Clinton, the point is to force Japan to buy more American products, for which the American government will graciously if reluctantly permit the Japanese to sell their products to American consumers.
Imports are the price government pays to get other nations to accept our exports.
Nafta represents a continuation of this system by enlisting the U.S. government and American taxpayers in this cause. Yet Nafta is more than just a big business trade deal. It is part of very long campaign to integrate and cartelize government in order to entrench the interventionist mixed economy. In Europe, the campaign culminated in the Maastricht Treaty, the attempt to impose a single currency and central bank on Europe and force its relatively free economies to rachet up their regulatory and welfare states. In United States, this has taken the form of transferring legislative and judicial authority away from the states and localities to the executive branch of the federal government.