5 ms·

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

• 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.
    • Retric 4y ago
      That’s very much the case, especially as wars destroy resources over time. Starting with a huge fleet of ships on day 1 isn’t that useful by year 5.
  • sydd 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) What the last ~3 years have taught us is that a country should not have critical dependencies on another country. The keywords for the first part of the 21st century will be Deglobalization and aging societies, better buckle up.
    • missedthecue 4y ago
      I don't think having 200+ individual autarkies is going to produce net benefits for humanity. Really, the once in a century pandemic is worth having the other 99 years of high efficiency supply chains.
      • corrral 4y ago
        I think people's opinions on this are largely divided over whether they think the current ~75 years of peace (more or less—cold war's not a hot war, and limited proxy wars aren't world wars) between major powers is likely to continue. The pandemic was a tiny fraction as disruptive as a major war would be, and we struggled to handle that—if one expects a higher frequency of trade disruption in the coming decades than in the past few, reducing reliance on foreign trade might be a reasonable position.
• legitster 4y ago
  The article says there are less than 100 eligible Jones Act ships.
  • hadlock 4y ago
    Oceangoing ships. There are thousands upon thousands of tugs and barges moving unfathomable numbers of bulk goods up and down the mississippi, along the intercoastal waterways every day.
• Tuna-Fish 4y ago
  The reserve is uselessly small. Crucially, if the line about ships having to be built in the US was repealed, the reserve would become a lot bigger. The Jones Act has more than one requirement, and while some of them are useful, others very much are not.
• mytailorisrich 4y ago
  If WWIII started I'm sure the US government would have no qualm about commandeering the ships in US harbours and/or US waters.
  • Retric 4y ago
    That’s helpful on day 1, not so much by year 6. It’s vastly faster to start with a small team that knows how to build stuff and expand that team than it is to start completely from scratch. But you can only maintain that knowledge by actually building stuff. So yes it’s inefficient in peacetime, but so is having the worlds most powerful military. It’s silly to spend that kind of money on a military and then leave easily exploitable weakness in our logistics.
    • cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I wouldn’t expect WWIII to last that long. Plus ships are big expensive floating targets of no particular use in a total war between nuclear powers.
      • antonymy 4y ago
        >I wouldn’t expect WWIII to last that long. People said the same about WWI and look how that ended up.
        • cjbgkagh 4y ago
          WWI was fantastically destructive war of 4 short years, which is very short for a war. 'People' always underestimate the cost of war when selling the idea to the public. Imagine if they were realistic then maybe we wouldn't go to war. I'm not suggesting WWIII would be short because someone wins it, just that if a nuclear exchange happens there won't be enough left to keep fighting with.
          • Retric 4y ago
            I think there is some ambiguity here. An India vs Pakistan war could continue after a nuclear exchange as they don’t have that many nuclear weapons to glass each other and survivors would presumably want vengeance. For the US it might take a reasonably effective missile defense system, but that’s not outside the realm of possibility.