200-foot-long railway to nowhere is a brilliant shipping loophole

> I wonder why we don't have more laws that gradually change things. Like instead of having jones act or no jones act as the only two options what if we could slowly remove the jones act at a rate of 3% per year or whatever? It could begin to improve things for people but also give the domestic industry some time to adapt.

Because maybe that would just draw out the failure, while still failing to achieve some of the main goals of the Jones Act?

Economic "efficiency" is not the only goal that should be pursued, which the events of the last few years should have made clear.

See the difference? Value vs. cost. Very different.

And not only Hawaii, many other places too. The costs fell on Puerto Rico when Congress refused to lift the Jones requirements to ease shipping costs even after the hurricane left them desperate for supplies. I guess the national priority fo ensuring a home-based merchant marine fleet outweighed people's need for toilet paper and medical supplies.

1. transported on ships that are built

  We want to maintain domestic shipyard capacity and not have the only shipyards be those that are government contractors. Why? Imagine if we are ever in a situation where we need Liberty Ships again. 

  We want to both protect domestic owners as well as be able to hold them accountable if they screw up. You sometimes hear stories about ships abandoned by their owners and the crew forced to stay on the vessel. Or abandoned cargo such as the fertilizer that caused the Beirut blast. We want to minimize those situations. 

  We want the people working the ships to be invested in our country and we want to maintain a population with these skills. Why? In the event of a Liberty Ship situation, you need people to crew them. But also accountability, who is more likely to report the captain ordering waste oil to be dumped overboard: A US citizen who knows the rules or a sailor from Indonesia whose passport is being held by the captain? 

Lastly, the Jones Act only applies to goods shipped between US ports. So if Hawaii is buying Russian gas from Russia, as long as the ship goes from Russia to Hawaii the Jones Act doesn't apply.

Basically the same reason Japan subsidizes grain production or why Sweden doesn't buy its fighter jets from Russia. Sure, it'd be cheaper to import, but it's also a vulnerability.

It would make America dependent on foreign powers for the shipping of goods vital to the economy and even national security. How do you move oil to Hawaii and military hardware to Guam if foreign carriers decide to embargo the USA?

A ship flagged under country X has to obey the laws of country X. So a Liberian flagged ship has to obey the laws of Liberia. The minimum wages in Liberia is much less then the US. Overtime rules more relaxed. Safety standards are more relaxed.

The cost of not having one is hard to put a number on but very likely much higher than the savings of offshoring all of your shipping.

>The reliance on judicial opinion is a strength of common law systems, and is a significant contributor to the robust commercial systems in the United Kingdom and United States. Because there is reasonably precise guidance on almost every issue, parties (especially commercial parties) can predict whether a proposed course of action is likely to be lawful or unlawful, and have some assurance of consistency.[76] As Justice Brandeis famously expressed it, "in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right."[77] This ability to predict gives more freedom to come close to the boundaries of the law.[78] For example, many commercial contracts are more economically efficient, and create greater wealth, because the parties know ahead of time that the proposed arrangement, though perhaps close to the line, is almost certainly legal. Newspapers, taxpayer-funded entities with some religious affiliation, and political parties can obtain fairly clear guidance on the boundaries within which their freedom of expression rights apply.

>In contrast, in jurisdictions with very weak respect for precedent,[79] fine questions of law are redetermined anew each time they arise, making consistency and prediction more difficult, and procedures far more protracted than necessary because parties cannot rely on written statements of law as reliable guides.[76] In jurisdictions that do not have a strong allegiance to a large body of precedent, parties have less a priori guidance (unless the written law is very clear and kept updated) and must often leave a bigger "safety margin" of unexploited opportunities, and final determinations are reached only after far larger expenditures on legal fees by the parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

The only way you can get to that point via a slippery slope is to bring your own barrels of lubricant and spend a while clearing rocks and trees and other obstacles off of your slope. You might even have to put some effort into increasing the grade of that slope.

IMO the fact that US culture is utterly intolerant of any kind of "spirit of the law" governance is one of the reasons why America can't have nice things. It's regulatory bodies have other problems, but one of the main ones is that they are toothless because they generally aren't given any real power. Where they are (such as the FAA), they're often much more effective.