Comment by themaninthedark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themaninthedark | Hacker News Reader

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themaninthedark

There is a group of people who are convinced that the Jones Act is bad, either they have been mislead or another reason.

From that, there is a shortcut to the reasoning that occurs: Intercostal shipping is expensive : Jones Act's fault Can't build ships fast enough : Jones Act's fault Ships are expensive ; Jones Act's fault

The things that the Jones Act mandates are that: Shipping between American ports must be done on American built, owned and crewed.

For example, they will claim that foreign ships can't deliver to Hawaii or Porto Rico and that is why things are expensive there. However: ...although ships can offload cargo and proceed to the contiguous U.S. without picking up any additional cargo intended for delivery to another U.S. location... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Ef...

So it is possible for a ship from say China to deliver to Hawaii or Porto Rico, they are just not allowed to pick up cargo to deliver to the US from there.

They will claim with one breath, American labor is too expensive and then turn around and say that we would have a ship building boom if only we didn't mandate that we build ships.

I would agree that American labor is expensive, it is easy to lower costs when you have a LCOL area, don't care about worker protections and don't care about environmental effects.

My impression was that most opposition to the jones act was that it has not really worked, and as a side effect drastically reduced the intra-us shipping industry.

Without the jones act, we would not have a ship building boom, but we probably would have more intra-US shipping via ship/rivers/etc.

I agree, without the Jones Act we would have much more inter-coastal shipping but that was not what the grandparent was claiming:

>This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without >dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have >pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago,

From another discussion on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33263176

>>The Jones Act, and the reduction in demand that it triggered, hasn’t prevented

>>and in fact probably caused—the closure of 300 domestic shipyards since the >>early 1980s.

and from comments: >The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well.

>According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US >built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful.

So there is this narrative that if we just get rid of the restrictions, suddenly we will become competitive.

In another thread, someone mentioned that we just had an election between a TV personality and the other a fake persona : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931904 and how we need to stop electing elites.

That in a nutshell is why Trump was able to win, he is not viewed as an elite and everything he sets out to do, the elites are screaming "THAT WON"T WORK!!!". 3 years ago, the same establishment types were saying "No inflation", "Well...transitory inflation" to "Well, the rate of inflation is back to where we set our targets" and "GDP is at the highest levels ever!" while everyone is asking if we are stepping into a recession.

I don't agree with a lot of what he is doing, however I do agree that we need to do something different. Our previous leaders and policy makers set us on a path where labor is not valued, unions are despised and greed is good. You can't run a society without labor and protections(both for workers and environmental) and a strict focus on wealth alone leads you to a desolate place.

The Jones Act is bad because it's a bandaid on a more serious wound. Repeal the Jones Act, let what remains of American shipbuilding die, and maybe then someone will try to fix it. Right now the Jones Act just lets people point at the remaining American shipbuilders and say "see? They're viable with our current strategy! We just need to do more!" The only reason the current strategy has any life in it at all is because of the Jones Act; otherwise, it's not viable at all.

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