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> The Jones Act is one section of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. During the early 20th century, Americans found the British and German ships they depended on

> The Jones Act is one section of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. During the early 20th century, Americans found the British and German ships they depended on for international commerce had ditched them to wage war. Congress decided to help fund a merchant marine for the United States with hefty subsidies. These payments dried up by the 1980s when former President Ronald Reagan halted the flow of taxpayer money to the shipping industry. Perfect illustration of the "more efficient trade vs. national security" tension under discussion over in the "America needs supply-side reform" thread.

xnx 4y ago
Paralleled by many cheap vs. reliable tradeoffs when people have been discussing supply chain fragility recently.
missedthecue 4y ago
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.
- cronix 4y ago
  The factories that built most of the equipment in WW2 didn't exist prior to WW2. They were built because of it.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    And this would have happened Jones Act or not.
    - corrral 4y ago
      I believe the poster was addressing your "we wouldn't be able to build enough ships anyway", not whether the Jones Act affected our ability to rapidly increase our manufacturing capacity during WWII.
  - tomohawk 4y ago
    And we dismantled that equipment and sold it to overseas shipbuilders, giving them a huge advantage.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - andrewallbright 4y ago
    I honestly do not understand how the mass mobilization of the US economy for war in the 1940s actually happened or operated. 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.
    - drc500free 4y ago
      I think the difference is that the country was managed and run by a tight-knit kabal of ivy-league upper class people. It was a high-trust environment where someone could call up an acquaintance and just say "Bob, you need to change your factory over to tanks this week. Harry will send the schematics, and we'll figure out the fine grained details later." The origins of the CIA and FBI sound mind-boggling to modern ears. These days you only see that kind of high-trust procurement in the special operations community. 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.
    - Hellbanevil 4y ago
      An good example is the former shipyard at Sausalito, CA. 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 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.
  - asdff 4y ago
    Because we adopted a centrally planned economy, not unlike the communist states we villified after the war ended and we resumed freemarket capitalism in this country. I don't see the U.S. successfully doing that again today with the way the political landscape is fractured and the overall view of government in the eyes of many.
- Johnny555 4y ago
  Will WW3 be won by ships anyway?
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    If shipbuilding isn't even needed, the entire basis for the Jones Act existing is moot.
  - vanattab 4y ago
    Probably not but then war would certainly be lost without them.
- krapht 4y ago
  Huh? Are you saying it doesn't produce a small reserve of merchant shipping vessels? This all or nothing thinking isn't helpful. Utterly useless? Some n ships is better than no ships.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Some sufficiently small n is indistinguishable from zero at the national scale. "Something is better than nothing" needs to be measurable and worth the cost, otherwise it's virtue-signaling.
  - throwaway6734 4y ago
    Why can't the military take over this role?
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    I'm saying it would be better to buy higher quality ships at a lower price from places like Japan or South Korea (who are very good at shipbuilding) than to have a few struggling ship yards that only exist because a federal law outright bans competition from running them out of business. 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.
    - corrral 4y ago
      I do think it likely there's a big difference in ability to respond to a crisis between "we have some capacity and expertise, but need more" and "we have no capacity or expertise, and need more", but admittedly I don't know how crucial having the right knowledge & existing systems/processes to copy, is for spinning up new shipyards. I would expect "copy this shipyard and have the experts there train others" would go a lot faster and have far better outcomes than "build a shipyard from scratch with no easily-accessible reference or expert trainers". 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.
- corrral 4y ago
  It reads to me like it did OK until we cut the funding that made it work.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    If you have to ban competition and send them taxpayer money, maybe that's a sign from god.
    - corrral 4y ago
      It's a sign that... national security is at odds with market efficiency. Of course doing things less efficiently costs money, and if you don't spend that money, it doesn't get done. [EDIT] To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion on whether it remains a good idea to keep this act around.
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        There is no limit to inefficiency. Maintaining entrenched corporatist monopolies via corrupt regulatory capture is long run much worse for national security.
        corrral 4y ago
        This is a pretty extreme position. That some inefficiency is necessary for national security reasons is about as close to settled as anything gets in economics/political-economy, though there's plenty of room to disagree over how much.
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        Inefficiencies beget inefficiencies. The money gained by those who benefit from the inefficiencies will be reinvested into developing more inefficiencies. Maintaining an efficient system requires constant vigilance. 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.
- pjscott 4y ago
  One possible alternate way to get a lot of shipbuilding capacity on demand is to pay major overseas shipbuilders in allied countries to (a) build ships for within-US shipping and (b) devote some dedicated percentage of their production to the US in case of geopolitical emergency. The world's second- and third-biggest shipbuilders are Mitsubishi and Hyundai, both in closely-allied countries; surely there's some amount of money that would make them happy to help out. They're very good at making ships efficiently, much better than the US at this point.
  - krapht 4y ago
    If there was a geopolitical emergency that needed massive US shipbuilding efforts (ie. naval war over Taiwan) it seems obvious that Japanese and Korean shipyards would be smoking craters from Chinese medium range ballistic missiles. Assuming, as usual, that any Taiwan conflict doesn't escalate into nuclear war. So any such agreement would be worth as much as the raw paper it was written on.
    - corrral 4y ago
      It's not even necessary that the shipyard be destroyed, just that the countries they're based in need shipyard output more than they need to honor their agreements with us. 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.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      Raw paper would be worth more as that paper could still be used for other things.
gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
I asked Yoho to repeal it at a town hall. He said that he would get back to me. He did not get back with me. His initial support for it was to avoid harm to Florida’s ship builders. My follow up was why should we support an underperforming industry?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

xnx 4y ago

Paralleled by many cheap vs. reliable tradeoffs when people have been discussing supply chain fragility recently.

missedthecue 4y ago

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.

cronix 4y ago
The factories that built most of the equipment in WW2 didn't exist prior to WW2. They were built because of it.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  And this would have happened Jones Act or not.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I believe the poster was addressing your "we wouldn't be able to build enough ships anyway", not whether the Jones Act affected our ability to rapidly increase our manufacturing capacity during WWII.
- tomohawk 4y ago
  And we dismantled that equipment and sold it to overseas shipbuilders, giving them a huge advantage.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andrewallbright 4y ago
  I honestly do not understand how the mass mobilization of the US economy for war in the 1940s actually happened or operated. 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.
  - drc500free 4y ago
    I think the difference is that the country was managed and run by a tight-knit kabal of ivy-league upper class people. It was a high-trust environment where someone could call up an acquaintance and just say "Bob, you need to change your factory over to tanks this week. Harry will send the schematics, and we'll figure out the fine grained details later." The origins of the CIA and FBI sound mind-boggling to modern ears. These days you only see that kind of high-trust procurement in the special operations community. 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.
  - Hellbanevil 4y ago
    An good example is the former shipyard at Sausalito, CA. 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 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.
- asdff 4y ago
  Because we adopted a centrally planned economy, not unlike the communist states we villified after the war ended and we resumed freemarket capitalism in this country. I don't see the U.S. successfully doing that again today with the way the political landscape is fractured and the overall view of government in the eyes of many.
Johnny555 4y ago
Will WW3 be won by ships anyway?
- missedthecue 4y ago
  If shipbuilding isn't even needed, the entire basis for the Jones Act existing is moot.
- vanattab 4y ago
  Probably not but then war would certainly be lost without them.
krapht 4y ago
Huh? Are you saying it doesn't produce a small reserve of merchant shipping vessels? This all or nothing thinking isn't helpful. Utterly useless? Some n ships is better than no ships.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Some sufficiently small n is indistinguishable from zero at the national scale. "Something is better than nothing" needs to be measurable and worth the cost, otherwise it's virtue-signaling.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  Why can't the military take over this role?
- missedthecue 4y ago
  I'm saying it would be better to buy higher quality ships at a lower price from places like Japan or South Korea (who are very good at shipbuilding) than to have a few struggling ship yards that only exist because a federal law outright bans competition from running them out of business. 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.
  - corrral 4y ago
    I do think it likely there's a big difference in ability to respond to a crisis between "we have some capacity and expertise, but need more" and "we have no capacity or expertise, and need more", but admittedly I don't know how crucial having the right knowledge & existing systems/processes to copy, is for spinning up new shipyards. I would expect "copy this shipyard and have the experts there train others" would go a lot faster and have far better outcomes than "build a shipyard from scratch with no easily-accessible reference or expert trainers". 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.
corrral 4y ago
It reads to me like it did OK until we cut the funding that made it work.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  If you have to ban competition and send them taxpayer money, maybe that's a sign from god.
  - corrral 4y ago
    It's a sign that... national security is at odds with market efficiency. Of course doing things less efficiently costs money, and if you don't spend that money, it doesn't get done. [EDIT] To be clear, I don't have a strong opinion on whether it remains a good idea to keep this act around.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      There is no limit to inefficiency. Maintaining entrenched corporatist monopolies via corrupt regulatory capture is long run much worse for national security.
      - corrral 4y ago
        This is a pretty extreme position. That some inefficiency is necessary for national security reasons is about as close to settled as anything gets in economics/political-economy, though there's plenty of room to disagree over how much.
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        Inefficiencies beget inefficiencies. The money gained by those who benefit from the inefficiencies will be reinvested into developing more inefficiencies. Maintaining an efficient system requires constant vigilance. 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.
pjscott 4y ago
One possible alternate way to get a lot of shipbuilding capacity on demand is to pay major overseas shipbuilders in allied countries to (a) build ships for within-US shipping and (b) devote some dedicated percentage of their production to the US in case of geopolitical emergency. The world's second- and third-biggest shipbuilders are Mitsubishi and Hyundai, both in closely-allied countries; surely there's some amount of money that would make them happy to help out. They're very good at making ships efficiently, much better than the US at this point.
- krapht 4y ago
  If there was a geopolitical emergency that needed massive US shipbuilding efforts (ie. naval war over Taiwan) it seems obvious that Japanese and Korean shipyards would be smoking craters from Chinese medium range ballistic missiles. Assuming, as usual, that any Taiwan conflict doesn't escalate into nuclear war. So any such agreement would be worth as much as the raw paper it was written on.
  - corrral 4y ago
    It's not even necessary that the shipyard be destroyed, just that the countries they're based in need shipyard output more than they need to honor their agreements with us. 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.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Raw paper would be worth more as that paper could still be used for other things.

gadflyinyoureye 4y ago

I asked Yoho to repeal it at a town hall. He said that he would get back to me. He did not get back with me. His initial support for it was to avoid harm to Florida’s ship builders. My follow up was why should we support an underperforming industry?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]