And if WW3 went hot today, we wouldn't be able to build enough ships anyway. Jones Act is utterly useless in that it causes a lot of pain without solving the problem it was designed to fix.
This all or nothing thinking isn't helpful. Utterly useless? Some n ships is better than no ships.
I'm also pointing out that the national security argument doesn't hold water because being able to construct a small ship every couple of years is not going to be useful if we encounter a period where we need to build hundreds of vessels per year. We'd have to build that infrastructure from the ground up like we did in WW2. We'd have to do this whether or not the Jones Act is in place.
Therefore, I think it's better to scrap the Jones Act entirely. It's all cost, no benefit.
That'd be the a big part of the argument for the value of preserving even a wildly insufficient level of manufacturing capability for certain vital goods, I'd expect—that is, it may not be necessary that the effect is to have a large and thriving shipbuilding industry, for it to still be worth it.
What the last ~3 years have taught us is that a country should not have critical dependencies on another country. The keywords for the first part of the 21st century will be Deglobalization and aging societies, better buckle up.
The Jones Act has more than one requirement, and while some of them are useful, others very much are not.
It’s vastly faster to start with a small team that knows how to build stuff and expand that team than it is to start completely from scratch. But you can only maintain that knowledge by actually building stuff.
So yes it’s inefficient in peacetime, but so is having the worlds most powerful military. It’s silly to spend that kind of money on a military and then leave easily exploitable weakness in our logistics.
I'm not suggesting WWIII would be short because someone wins it, just that if a nuclear exchange happens there won't be enough left to keep fighting with.
An India vs Pakistan war could continue after a nuclear exchange as they don’t have that many nuclear weapons to glass each other and survivors would presumably want vengeance.
For the US it might take a reasonably effective missile defense system, but that’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Anyway, I personally don’t believe the US has a highly effective nuclear defense system, but even the possibility of such changes the calculus of war. The more bombs you need to send to each target the fewer targets you can hit. DC and NYC are presumably fucked either way, but Tuscaloosa Alabama could easily survive the second scenario.
It’s completely theoretical at this point, but coming up for plausible scenarios where the Jones Act ends up worthwhile doesn’t seem that difficult.
The US is a net energy exporter.
Of course, this presumes rational actors on all sides, which is very much not a given (esp. looking at Russia right now).
Peacetime subsidies are only useful for capabilities that would be prohibitively costly or long to setup un time of war.
Also the act aids not just in building ships but also managing, maintaining, and crewing them. The skills and lessons learned over time of a domestic industry vs a ~0.2% increase in boat shipping costs is worth considering. Especially as most do these costs relate to paying US workers and US taxes.
[EDIT] To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion on whether it remains a good idea to keep this act around.
The US is a precarious hegemon, for all of the inefficiency it has invested into the MIC it doesn’t seemed to have gained very much.
Not everything is about maximizing profitability. Efficient markets are pretty good at optimizing around steady-state systems, but they are profoundly bad at maintaining readiness for cataclysmic events. Yet cataclysmic events happen and we are obliged to prepare for them.
If we let corporations run everything, they'd sell of our medical stockpiles, build levees exactly one inch above the waterline, and sell all of our weapons to the highest bidder.
I can’t tell if these were intended to be examples of things that have happened?
Capitalism is indeed the god, and the atheists and fence sitters find it a bit depressing.
So any such agreement would be worth as much as the raw paper it was written on.
Sourcing foreign ships for domestic use may be a good idea, but production-sharing agreements like that are worthless when it really matters. If you don't have physical possession of the productive capital (legal possession can be, and is, ignored when shit hits the fan, so that hardly matters) then you can't count on it in a crisis.
Was it bottom up, with factories competing to make products (trucks, ammo) for lend lease? Basically government used tax payer money to become a big buyer of things, incentivizing companies to reorient towards making those things? And then when the US entered the war, the types of contracts offered changed.
Was it top down, with the government operating more like a command economy telling businesses what to make, and when? It wasn't a choice, it was a demand because the country is at war!
These are two guesses I have. My mental model is based mostly on the movie "War Dogs." I'm sure it's a mix of both bottom up and top down. Maybe with a mix of cocktail parties with important industry business people and important government people chatting about would is feasible sprinkled in.
I do not understand how the war time mobilization of the US economy actually happened. If anyone knows, I would appreciate a summary or a book recommendation. I think I have a topic for my next Wikipedia deep dive.
We needed ships.
The government went in and built a huge shipyard. They hired private contractors, and built 24/7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marinship)
They needed workers. They hired Frank Loyd Wright to build huge buildings to house workers arriving mainly from the south.
The huge apartments went up very quickly.
There were few regulations. I imagine it was like the way China puts up huge projects.
After the war, a lot of the workforce moved on to greener pastures. America used to have a lot of good blue collar jobs.
The apartments are now used as Section 8 housing.
Jump ahead to today. The town of Sausalito didn't like looking at low income Anchor-Outs. They didn't mind when Paul Allen moored in then same spot for months though on his mega-yacht. The town basically hired some dig bat who was related to a town council member to spit out a study on the dangers these Anchor-outs are doing to the Ell grass in Richardson bay. The town used that "cooked" study to confiscate boats, and crush them. The low income people basically went from boat dwellers to living in tents in Dunphy Park. I'm sorry about my tone, but I don't like it when authorities abuse their power, especially when it comes to the low income.
"Gasoline, meat, and clothing were tightly rationed. Most families were allocated 3 US gallons (11 l; 2.5 imp gal) of gasoline a week, which sharply curtailed driving for any purpose. Production of most durable goods, like new housing, vacuum cleaners, and kitchen appliances, was banned until the war ended.[1] In industrial areas housing was in short supply as people doubled up and lived in cramped quarters. Prices and wages were controlled."
From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_home_front_durin...
And some amusing artifacts were produced as a result of that. For example, the M1 Carbine was manufactured among others by IBM, Rock-Ola, and the National Postal Meter Company. After the war, these became collector items of sorts, since the manufacturer name is prominent on all of them.
After the war, Ford made a promotional film, "The Story of Willow Run" [2], that shows the progression from soybean farm to aircraft factory, the redesign of the bomber for manufacturing, and the assembly line processes. The YouTube comments from factory worker descendants are fascinating.
Obviously there are some serious downsides to having a cabal of rich white dudes who went to the same schools run the administration of the whole country, but things could change direction a lot quicker.