A tariff by any other name, and definitely protectionism and anti-free trade, which I don't object to. This conversation started with this statement from you:
True, but the post-war Germany miracle, especially in the critical first ten years, was accomplished by embracing the free market principles of Ludwig Erhard, not the protectionist proposals of Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump.
No, the VAT applied to imports is a protectionist measure, designed to add tax costs incurred by German produced products at various stages of production, prior to becoming finished goods, to imported finished products. No different than calculating a tariff based upon another nation's lower labor costs, or lower environmental costs, to "level the playing field" when an exporter has lower labor and environmental costs than the importer.
And various nations used many different non-tariff and tariff-by-any-other-name methods as protectionist measures. True free trade allows NO schemes to add costs to imports because the exporter had lower costs in some area. That defeats the concept of comparative advantage, which is also fine with me.
By applying the VAT to imports at the point-of-entry, Germany is definitely NOT practicing free trade. Then, the imported product will properly have the VAT applied within Germany at other stages such as transportation, maybe wholesale and then retail.
It's fine with me if Germany and the EU apply a VAT to imports, but don't then claim that they are practicing free trade.
The VAT is a consumption tax, as are the sales and excise taxes we have in the U.S. It doesn’t matter, from that perspective, that the VAT is collected from businesses on their “value added” in the supply chain. We impose sales taxes on imported goods that are consumed here; is that a tariff? If so, the word has lost meaning. If the consumption of imports were untaxed, there would be a powerful incentive to consume imported goods rather than domestically produced goods. Is that what you advocate?