> This will never succeed because the economies of scale are nonexistent without dominance in the commercial shipbuilding market. War planners should have pushed to repeal the Jones Act decades ago The US used to subsidize the salaries of US merchant marines on ships (US salaries are higher than Filipino ones) so that there would be a trained population, but that was stopped in the 1980s because subsidies are bad, so there are hardly any US merchant marines any more. The US government used to own transport boats and lease them to US shipping companies, but they've not bothered to build news ones in decades, and so most transport ships are foreign owned. If there's a war, and you need ship matériel to the war zone, do you think commercial ships will enter it? Perhaps the US government should eschew the Free Market™ a bit and own the means of transportation. The point of the Jones Act —or at least that one particular section that a lot of folks tend to talk about—is to have US citizens and US ships available in case of war. But given US prices relative to the prices for other countries, it costs more, and the US has not been willing to pay the premium to support that readiness. Edit: The channel What's Going on with Shipping? has a number of videos on the topic of the what people call "the Jones Act ", but more specifically about Section 27, the cabotage rules. See perhaps these to get a good overview of the topic: * "The pros and cons of The Jones Act", [link] * "The Jones Act
in “The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution” · View on HN