81–90 of 328 posts
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What industries? Steel? Protectionism. Batteries? Protectionism. Solar? Protectionism. Autos? Protectionism. Aircraft? Protectionism. Agriculture? Protectionism. Why? Because efficiency is a tradeoff where you give up security and resiliency.
Service industries.
I'm afraid this might be too much of a stupid question (and I promise I'm not American), but can't they just shoot at the ice as they go?
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Congress has been pushed not to eliminate would completely wipe out tiny remaining American Merchant Marine fleet. Most people who want to get rid of Jones Act are economists and other types who sole concern is "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns. We could talk about modify it maybe allowing purchase of specialized ships from overseas friendly countries,…
> "How much more money can we make from cheap shipping" while ignoring any national security concerns. But isn't it the case that national security concerns are being reached, presently, under the effect of the Jones Act? We just don't have the capacity to build the naval vessels that we need for national security.
It's not being fully met. Likely with elimination of Jones Act, it would disappear entirely. So it's one of those, it's bad now, do you want to eliminate it completely?
Only way I could see Jones Act disappearing but Merchant Marine Fleet to remain intact is announce that US is done playing world Navy Police. If it's not US Flagged, US is done giving a shit. Economic worldwide collapse to follow.
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Canada has 20 light and medium icebreakers and just started a new project to build two more that will apparently "be among the most powerful conventional icebreakers in the world": https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/service... Given the close economic and cultural ties of these countries, surely some kind of knowledge transfer could happen, if not actual nearshoring the construction. Could NAFTA (or…
Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too. And Norway and Sweden and whoever else might have the skills and experience.
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Except if you can't move stuff around without support of 3rd party nations, that's defense crippling. If you want to be a global power, you require great navy, both civilian and military. That's been true since 1500s and will likely remain true for many years to come. So question is, do we throw out Jones Act and slowly stop being World Superpower or leave it and pay higher upfront costs in certain places? That's pol…
I think the argument among the anti-Jones contingent is that our only real hope of having a globally competitive shipbuilding industry is to repeal it and all the other things preventing our shipyards and merchant marine from having incentive to compete globally. As it is, there is a slow trickle of work for domestic shipyards that is based solely on policy (ships that legally HAVE to be US-made, whether for Jones Ac…
You'd instead see all domestic shipping be entirely dependant on third-party international operators paying third-world wages to third-world crews, and you'd have next to zero recourse against them if they, say, run one of their ships into a bridge, or spill a few million litres of oil.
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“Leading to good commercial results” is definitely not the rationale for the Jones Act.
Read the wiki link. [1] The goal was to have a globally competitive merchant marine based on a home grown ship building industry to call on in case of war. Trying to balance both sides. The end result is that that home grown ship building industry has all but disappeared together with the educated population required to crew it. [1]; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
What economists argue that the Jones Act is suppressing is greater use of domestic sea transport, which could be much cheaper than trains and trucks. Without the Jones Act sea transport would grow, but undoubtedly using foreign ships, perhaps relying on a primarily foreign crew. OTOH, a much larger domestic shipping industry would likely spur demand for downstream services, as well as open up opportunities for growth elsewhere in the economy, so overall jobs for Americans might grow. But deregulation grow the ship building industry domestically? Nobody expects that.
> We also see the same cultural issues that we saw with American shipbuilding more broadly. There seems to be a lack of motivation to take maritime issues seriously or treat them as important. This is the meat of the article in my mind. The US has globalized away its maritime industry in general and we now lack the institutional knowledge, infrastructure, and labor force needed to operate even semi-independently on t…
> The US has globalized away its maritime industry It hasn't. Jones Act _protects_ the US maritime industry, so it stagnated and died. Nobody wants the US ships unless they have to use them, they're crap compared to ships from other countries. > and they still can't find builders. That's because shipyards are basically a defense industry subsidiary. So they receive a fixed amount of orders, and it's known for years i…
Similar with Boeing too.
Now that Finland is a member of NATO, it would make sense to outsource icebreakers to Finland. Finland has 64 F-35 jets on order from the US, costing more than a few icebreakers. VT Halter Marine, the troubled US contractor, went bust and was sold in 2022.
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Interesting. I would conjecture that we have the same cultural issues at this point preventing us from building effective passenger rail systems.
The US doesn't have effective passenger rail systems for the same reason that Europe and Japan don't have effective freight rail systems: you have to optimize for one use case or the other or else have two completely separate systems, which takes up a lot of extra land.
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Having your own manufacturing and industrial base is also very, very important from a geopolitical perspective. (as european countries have come to realise after the invasion of ukraine). you need your own industrial base to manufacture and develop the machinery you need to defend and project hard and soft power across the globe. Globalisation was supposed to "solve this issue" by making economies so interconnected t…
> Sadly, we have learned that that simply does not hold up. We've learned that the world now is more divided and violent than we had hoped, with the revisionist Chinese and Russians on one side and the US Republicans on the other (or sometimes on the same side as Russia!) So we depend more on the military, and also we can't depend on China's manufacturing to supply military goods. But can the US depend on Europe's, S…
If our goal is to be robust against the risks of a great power conflict, we can't necessarily depend on manufacturing from these countries because a great power conflict might either overrun or cut off our supply lines to these countries. In fact, control over East Asian shipping lanes is the central point of the current cold war with China.