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> Which is dumb. You could still repeal the Jones Act and require the ships to be US flagged or crewed. Or restrict it to countries that have signed security/tr

by tivert 3y ago

> Which is dumb. You could still repeal the Jones Act and require the ships to be US flagged or crewed. Or restrict it to countries that have signed security/trade deals with the US. > Even still, were war declared, a Chinese grain barge in Missouri isn't going to pose much of a threat. Most likely it would be commandeered by the US anyway! No, your idea is dumb. If war is declared, are the Chinese going to let the US use its shipyards? The 90s called, and it wants its always-smooth-sailing free trade fantasies back.

legitster 3y ago
I mean, this whole hypothetical is dumb. The top shipbuilding companies in the world are in South Korea and Japan - strong US allies. But even if the Mississippi was covered in Chinese manufactured and owned ships, if war were to break out, we would just seize the ships. There would not be a huge impact to our infrastructure. The only real vulnerability would be deep-water domestic transport - places like Guam and Hawaii. But the irony is the Jones Act has made these places more reliant on Chinese shipping because domestic transit options are so stinking expensive.
- eszed 3y ago
  In the interests of steelmanning: without the "US crewed" provision of the Jones Act, all of those ships would be manned by poorly-paid foreign sailors. Americans would be driven out of the profession, which - in the event of the war you postulate - would cripple US logistical infrastructure just as certainly as if those ships did not exist.
  - legitster 3y ago
    > without the "US crewed" provision of the Jones Act, all of those ships would be manned by poorly-paid foreign sailors Why would that be true? To work in the US you still need to (mostly) have legitimate papers. We don't require every truck or train in the US to only be driven by US citizens. It's weird to think that a barge going up and down the Mississippi would be held to a different standard. One thing people don't realize about the Jones Act is that it requires 75% of crews to be American citizens. The law dates back to a time when it was just as much about being anti-immigrant as it was protectionist.
    - eszed 3y ago
      If they're on foreign-flagged vessels, then US laws don't apply. That's kinda the whole point of foreign-flagged vessels. (As I understand it, crew can't go ashore without going through US immigration, but the ship itself is not - for legal purposes - under US jurisdiction.) I'd be on board (heh) for changing that - particularly for ships going up and down the Mississippi - but I don't know how you'd do it without changing hundreds of years of legal precedents, which I assume would be a hard lift. There may be elements of the Mississippi River Boat job which make using foreign crews completely impractical - like, maybe it can't be done without at least some of them going ashore? I'm pretty sure there aren't immigration agents at every river port!) - so maybe it's not a concern. I don't know anywhere near enough about the subject to make confident assertions about that. > 75% of crews to be American citizens I didn't know that, either! Thanks.
    - matthewowen 3y ago
      The default absent the Jones Act would likely be that vessels would move between US ports (which likely does include river ports) under non-US flags with non-US crews who simply never leave the vessel. Just as is the case for vessels going back and forth between the US and other countries. Requiring that these vessels adhere to American laws is exactly the intent of requiring them to be American flagged and crewed. I would agree with you that it's probably outdates that crewing has to be predominantly citizens and otherwise LPRs and it probably makes sense to open this up to legitimate immigrant labor too. But I'd argue that's an adjustment to the Jones Act vs a repeal of it. I think it's worth bearing in mind that we're responding to an article by the Cato Institute. Their interest is in stripping away regulations that put limits on big businesses. They are primarily funded by the Koch Family, whose companies spend _huge_ sums on domestic shipping in particular (think about the volume that Georgia-Pacific moves around). Of course they're in favor of reducing regulations that limit domestic shipping: they'd probably love to turn around and use a Liberia-flagged, Filipino crewed ship to move domestic shipments. It doesn't make their arguments _inherently_ valid, but there is an obvious self-serving motive.
- tivert 3y ago
  > I mean, this whole hypothetical is dumb. The top shipbuilding companies in the world are in South Korea and Japan - strong US allies. In any world where China and the US are shooting at each other, Japan and South Korea are getting shot at too. They have the severe drawback of being in adversary's backyard, not an ocean away. Not to say there aren't problems with US shipbuilding that need to be fixed (IIRC, unlike South Korea and Japan, all the suppliers and subcontractors are too geographically dispersed to be globally competitive), but repealing the Jones Act won't help with that. > But even if the Mississippi was covered in Chinese manufactured and owned ships, if war were to break out, we would just seize the ships. There would not be a huge impact to our infrastructure. That's assuming all the US needs in a war are its existing stock of ships with no need for replenishment, but that's almost certainly not true. Also, China's not dumb. What if the conflict is timed so that most of those ships are in no position to be seized? Or scuttled right as the conflict starts? But how about let's go all the way, and outsource military manufacturing the the China and Russia. What could go wrong? There's no such thing as a back door.
toast0 3y ago
I'm just going to assume that the US Navy is going to be locked into building boats at US shipyards. In the current system, in times of war, maybe there's a little bit of extra capacity because the domestic market commercial shipyards could build warships. In a post-Jones act scenario, that capacity wouldn't be there, and the Naval shipyards would need to expand capacity if additional capacity was needed. But how much excess shipbuilding capacity for war use do we really have today? I don't think it's really that much. For merchant vessels, I think we'd have to get by with what was already in the market before the war; or as the sibling pointed out, get by with orders built by other Asian countries. Commandeering merchant vessels owned / flagged by the other side of a war is pretty common. And while fleets typically go through a regular replacement regime, you can always extend things a bit, unless there's a lot of sinking of the merchant fleet; depends on the details of the war.

by tivert 3y ago

legitster 3y ago

I mean, this whole hypothetical is dumb. The top shipbuilding companies in the world are in South Korea and Japan - strong US allies. But even if the Mississippi was covered in Chinese manufactured and owned ships, if war were to break out, we would just seize the ships. There would not be a huge impact to our infrastructure. The only real vulnerability would be deep-water domestic transport - places like Guam and Hawaii. But the irony is the Jones Act has made these places more reliant on Chinese shipping because domestic transit options are so stinking expensive.

eszed 3y ago
In the interests of steelmanning: without the "US crewed" provision of the Jones Act, all of those ships would be manned by poorly-paid foreign sailors. Americans would be driven out of the profession, which - in the event of the war you postulate - would cripple US logistical infrastructure just as certainly as if those ships did not exist.
- legitster 3y ago
  > without the "US crewed" provision of the Jones Act, all of those ships would be manned by poorly-paid foreign sailors Why would that be true? To work in the US you still need to (mostly) have legitimate papers. We don't require every truck or train in the US to only be driven by US citizens. It's weird to think that a barge going up and down the Mississippi would be held to a different standard. One thing people don't realize about the Jones Act is that it requires 75% of crews to be American citizens. The law dates back to a time when it was just as much about being anti-immigrant as it was protectionist.
  - eszed 3y ago
    If they're on foreign-flagged vessels, then US laws don't apply. That's kinda the whole point of foreign-flagged vessels. (As I understand it, crew can't go ashore without going through US immigration, but the ship itself is not - for legal purposes - under US jurisdiction.) I'd be on board (heh) for changing that - particularly for ships going up and down the Mississippi - but I don't know how you'd do it without changing hundreds of years of legal precedents, which I assume would be a hard lift. There may be elements of the Mississippi River Boat job which make using foreign crews completely impractical - like, maybe it can't be done without at least some of them going ashore? I'm pretty sure there aren't immigration agents at every river port!) - so maybe it's not a concern. I don't know anywhere near enough about the subject to make confident assertions about that. > 75% of crews to be American citizens I didn't know that, either! Thanks.
  - matthewowen 3y ago
    The default absent the Jones Act would likely be that vessels would move between US ports (which likely does include river ports) under non-US flags with non-US crews who simply never leave the vessel. Just as is the case for vessels going back and forth between the US and other countries. Requiring that these vessels adhere to American laws is exactly the intent of requiring them to be American flagged and crewed. I would agree with you that it's probably outdates that crewing has to be predominantly citizens and otherwise LPRs and it probably makes sense to open this up to legitimate immigrant labor too. But I'd argue that's an adjustment to the Jones Act vs a repeal of it. I think it's worth bearing in mind that we're responding to an article by the Cato Institute. Their interest is in stripping away regulations that put limits on big businesses. They are primarily funded by the Koch Family, whose companies spend _huge_ sums on domestic shipping in particular (think about the volume that Georgia-Pacific moves around). Of course they're in favor of reducing regulations that limit domestic shipping: they'd probably love to turn around and use a Liberia-flagged, Filipino crewed ship to move domestic shipments. It doesn't make their arguments _inherently_ valid, but there is an obvious self-serving motive.
tivert 3y ago
> I mean, this whole hypothetical is dumb. The top shipbuilding companies in the world are in South Korea and Japan - strong US allies. In any world where China and the US are shooting at each other, Japan and South Korea are getting shot at too. They have the severe drawback of being in adversary's backyard, not an ocean away. Not to say there aren't problems with US shipbuilding that need to be fixed (IIRC, unlike South Korea and Japan, all the suppliers and subcontractors are too geographically dispersed to be globally competitive), but repealing the Jones Act won't help with that. > But even if the Mississippi was covered in Chinese manufactured and owned ships, if war were to break out, we would just seize the ships. There would not be a huge impact to our infrastructure. That's assuming all the US needs in a war are its existing stock of ships with no need for replenishment, but that's almost certainly not true. Also, China's not dumb. What if the conflict is timed so that most of those ships are in no position to be seized? Or scuttled right as the conflict starts? But how about let's go all the way, and outsource military manufacturing the the China and Russia. What could go wrong? There's no such thing as a back door.

toast0 3y ago

I'm just going to assume that the US Navy is going to be locked into building boats at US shipyards. In the current system, in times of war, maybe there's a little bit of extra capacity because the domestic market commercial shipyards could build warships. In a post-Jones act scenario, that capacity wouldn't be there, and the Naval shipyards would need to expand capacity if additional capacity was needed. But how much excess shipbuilding capacity for war use do we really have today? I don't think it's really that much. For merchant vessels, I think we'd have to get by with what was already in the market before the war; or as the sibling pointed out, get by with orders built by other Asian countries. Commandeering merchant vessels owned / flagged by the other side of a war is pretty common. And while fleets typically go through a regular replacement regime, you can always extend things a bit, unless there's a lot of sinking of the merchant fleet; depends on the details of the war.