Except, as far as I'm aware, the Jones Act hasn't prevented the collapse of the merchant marine fleet--in other words, it's failed to do its primary goal, and it has some pretty heft costs for everyone who doesn't live in mainland US.
If having any local shipbuilding capability is better than none, the act works enough.
IMHO, I'd drop Puerto Rico and other island territories from the act. Maybe Hawaii and Alaska too. The inducement to build and operate US based cargo ships for those markets clearly isn't sufficient, and it hurts the economy of the territories for little benefit. But keep it for the mainland --- I think effectively reserving US ports for foreign trade reduces import/export costs which helps the US interface with the global market.
Does it though, or is this a false sense of security? Regardless of the Jones Act the Navy is paying to modernize shipyards [0]. Meanwhile the small shipping industry propped up by the Jones Act seems to severely outdated, they were using steamships well past when the rest of the world stopped using them and manage to get away with more corruption due to lack of competition [1]. Maybe just drop the act, and have the Navy responsible for shipyards directly & ongoing, or something rather than hope a bunch of old fashioned, inefficient shipyards will be sufficient when we need them most?
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-105993
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freightwaves-classicsfalle...
Jone's Act doesn't protect any shipbuilding facility, beyond the existing government contracts forwarded to them.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freightwaves-classics-amer....
China does not have its own version of the Jones act, it's a uniquely American problem. Most countries aren't stupid enough to kill their internal industry.
Something that actually resulted in productive shipyards would be much better than what we have that results in shipyards that don't produce much, which is still likely better than no shipyards outside of those producing naval vessels and domestic ferries (although, those would probably be imported too, if that were legal; technically that's prohibited under a different act)
It also strikes me that the percentages mentioned in the article are very high. 75% US crew? 75% US owned? 100% US built? Revising the statute to operators needing 55% of their domestic fleet being US built, and requiring 55% US ownership, and a 55% US crew should be more than sufficient. Give tax incentives for newer, more efficient craft both to the manufacturer and the buyer.
The US uses a lot of military power for non-combat purposes. We move supplies for natural and humanitarian disasters. We have water purification ships, hospital ships, and generator ships. We transport weapons systems as cargo, and even those ships themselves could be mostly protected by a surrounding fleet. If we could get a design made that's fitting for heavy movers suitable for both military and civilian use the US government's purchases could bolster domestic shippers' orders.
One even more unusual option since it's a national security concern is the US government could buy large numbers of newer, more efficient craft and lease them on affordable terms (or lease to own even) to cargo companies.
Then instead of repeal it, fix it. I wonder if the flaw is that it didn't account for the changes in American sea traffic as foreign imports have undoubtedly increased by orders of magnitude since it was passed 100 years ago.
This is a consequence of math. The economics just don't make sense. I'm not sure what you can do to "fix it".
Most of US is accessible via freight rail or road freight transport. Ships transport almost exclusively foreign made products, today.
That's the primary reason why the merchant fleet is wasting away - there's no demand for marine transportation between US ports, other than required by Jones Act.
I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market.
You understand that this is because the Jones Act makes shipping domestically prohibitively expensive. Which is precisely why ground shippers are insistent that the Jones Act remain on the books.
> I have 0 interest in building something that has little to no use in a free market.
If you see a free market there, you haven't read the article.
That's not what I wrote.
So better have ship building capacity at 0% of China's and it be impossible to buy US built ships at any cost?
In a vacuum, the Jones Act should be encouraging the construction of new shipyards and/or freight rail infrastructure. That neither seems to have happened suggests that other barriers exist, and those barriers need addressed, Jones Act or no.
Let alone - merchant ships are needed to trade and interact with allies in these extreme situations. And last I checked Maersk is a Danish company, and Danmark is a close ally.
I agree that the Jones Act sucks, but I do think there's some valid reason behind trying to do what it tried to do.
As it stands - merchant fleet of US allied nations is strong enough for US to not need one at all.
If we're talking about US/European allies vs China - then European allies have the ships and capacity to build more.
You have to give a concrete example where US would need to have a merchant fleet, where allies aren't willing to provide.
> If we're talking about US/European allies vs China - then European allies have the ships and capacity to build more.
Not necessarily enough capacity if you're losing tens of ships a month, and there's no guarantee those would remain intact, or that we'd even be on the same side. It's easy to assume stable, decent-enough, friendly governments will continue to be that way indefinitely, but they may not (for other actors, it's very much worth worrying whether the US will remain so, for instance)
> You have to give a concrete example where US would need to have a merchant fleet, where allies aren't willing to provide.
We literally have a real world example, which is far more valuable than made-up scenarios, that was arguably won primarily by US industrial capacity and the ships to direct that output to the right places, and it's still (barely, admittedly) within living memory. Among the most famous machines of that war is a class of merchant ship, for very good reason.
Unless we suppose that modern great-powers wars will be over so fast that shipping wouldn't have time to play a major role, or we think that anti-shipping weapons would be so effective and have such wide reach that no amount of shipping & protection could keep a meaningful proportion of a shipping fleet afloat for any useful length of time even if we started with a significant upper-hand overall—and I sure wouldn't want to bet on either of those things—it seems like that'd still be highly relevant in any major conflict in, at least, the near- to mid-term future.
I'm not a mind reader - what is it?
In the last World War, the US built a ton of cargo ships (about 6,000) to replace ships that were sunk and to increase shipment capacity in general. Allies weren't able to build ships fast enough. I'd imagine that capacity will be needed in the next world war, too. Having existing shipyards helps get production ramping sooner.
Certainly, ware has changed a lot in 80 years, but all out war is still going to need a lot of shipping, and cargo ships carrying war materiel are going to be fair game for sinking, and need to be replaced (as well as escorted). Industrial capacity and availability of fuel will continue to be necessary but not sufficient for success on the battlefield.
It's still a national security issue that there's little domestic shipbuilding. In the event of a major war, it would be useful to have domestic shipbuilders available to press into service making warships, beyond the peacetime warship builders.
It’s no ship yard in Seattle.
Cruise missiles have entered the chat
Besides, it's very nice in these scenarios to build your ships the same place that's sending cargo, so you don't have to risk an empty or low-priority cargo trip the wrong direction before you can load up with the good stuff.
Plus, governments change. The US could well end up on a different side of a conflict from some current allies, or those allies might remain neutral and so avoid behaving too-favorably to the US.
Nation states have goals that the free market doesn’t value like stability or risk mitigation. Keeping an industry that can become critical around in a reduced capacity so that you don’t need to bootstrap from scratch is to governments like purchasing insurance on a car is for an individual who relies on one for their income.
There is no equivalent section of the free market that is looking on multi decade long horizons for risk mitigation in the same way that governments do.[1]There are industries that care about risk mitigation on 30-50 year schedules for individual pieces of heavy industrial capital but there aren’t any that will actively run or subsidize factories building parts for a market they don’t participate in for decades on the off chance they might need to spin that up ASAP.
[1]generalizing here. I’m sure you can find a handful of companies who do this but unless they represent double digit percentages of the entire economy I’m not going to be convinced that it’s a sign of the free market valuing stability
Water transport is much, much cheaper where there is not a burden, and is generally also more fuel-efficient per ton-mile. It should be possible for a wide variety of goods; the Mississippi alone is the largest river system in the ~~world~~. EDIT: North America, not the world
Mississippi is only the largest in the world after the Nile, Amazon, & Yangtze.
It's also good that the Mississippi is so navigable, pretty much all the way north-south through the country up to Minneapolis. The Nile is only really navigable to Aswan High Dam, the Yangtze and Amazon fare better on this metric.
[1] https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/i9QxpflmIAz...