Abolish the Jones Act

"maritime minstrels" is a little unhinged.

The piece never explains how getting rid of the Jones Act would improve anything. We're supposed to believe that removing the American protectionism in domestic shipping would result in anything other than an immediate and complete Chinese takeover of the entire market?

The author states the purpose of the Jones Act was to preserve US maritime capacity. He then claims that because the US does not have a global hegemony on this market, the Act has failed. Therefore, we should end Jones Act protectionism to compete with China.

I don’t see how removing a guaranteed market will spur investment in the capital intensive activity of ship building.

It also occurs to me to ask how much domestic shipping traffic there is in the first place, and if it is actually price-sensitive. Unlike Japan and Korea, most of the US is far from coastal and riverine shipping lanes.

The Boyd Institute was founded and is led by Jeff Giesea, according to the About page.

Jeff Giesea is an American entrepreneur, communications specialist, and national security writer who is a business affiliate of several of Peter Thiel's companies and venture capital groups.[1]

Gisea was one of the minds behind MAGA3X, a meme-happy social media organization that describes itself on Twitter as “a citizen grassroots movement that helped elect Trump”[2]

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Giesea

2 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/this-ma...