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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 hav

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.

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.