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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Time is just one dimension here, cost in peacetime is the other dimension.
Also the act aids not just in building ships but also managing, maintaining, and crewing them. The skills and lessons learned over time of a domestic industry vs a ~0.2% increase in boat shipping costs is worth considering. Especially as most do these costs relate to paying US workers and US taxes.
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.
It's not a given that WW3 would escalate into nuclear soon. All sides understand that once you go there, there's no way back. But there are still goals that can be achieved and territories that can be contested without resorting to nukes, and without making one's opponent desperate enough to do the same.
Of course, this presumes rational actors on all sides, which is very much not a given (esp. looking at Russia right now).
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.
I wouldn't classify India vs Pakistan as a world war. The primary nuclear belligerents would be US and Russia. I wouldn't trust the US military industrial complex to be honest about their missile defence capabilities and it worries me that the west is being so cavalier about possible nuclear war.
To be clear, I was suggesting an India vs Pakistan nuclear exchange could be part of a much larger conflict. WWII was called a world war because so many countries where involved and WWIII could similarly spiral even without a US vs Russia nuclear exchange.
Anyway, I personally don’t believe the US has a highly effective nuclear defense system, but even the possibility of such changes the calculus of war. The more bombs you need to send to each target the fewer targets you can hit. DC and NYC are presumably fucked either way, but Tuscaloosa Alabama could easily survive the second scenario.
It’s completely theoretical at this point, but coming up for plausible scenarios where the Jones Act ends up worthwhile doesn’t seem that difficult.
My expectation is the coming conflict will be between NATO and a Chinese Russian alliance. The US maintains its current standard of living based on cheap Chinese goods, cheap Russian energy (indirectly) and financialization. I expect that none of those things will survive such a conflict. Even if a city avoids getting nuked what life is left for them. Maybe they could get a job at Foxconn.
Simply look at how much damage the Russian Ukraine war is doing to the US and that is relatively a minor skirmish that the US is not even directly involved with.
I guess you can seize foreign-flagged ships as a non-combatant state, but I expect you'll become a combatant pretty soon, if you do too much of it. Nb these countries reducing availability of (their!) shipping capacity to the US during a war could include allies and neutral countries, not just enemies and likely enemies.
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.
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.
There is no limit to inefficiency. Maintaining entrenched corporatist monopolies via corrupt regulatory capture is long run much worse for national security.
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.
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.
Not everything is about maximizing profitability. Efficient markets are pretty good at optimizing around steady-state systems, but they are profoundly bad at maintaining readiness for cataclysmic events. Yet cataclysmic events happen and we are obliged to prepare for them.
If we let corporations run everything, they'd sell of our medical stockpiles, build levees exactly one inch above the waterline, and sell all of our weapons to the highest bidder.
> If we let corporations run everything, they'd sell of our medical stockpiles, build levees exactly one inch above the waterline, and sell all of our weapons to the highest bidder.
I can’t tell if these were intended to be examples of things that have happened?
Capitalism is indeed the god, and the atheists and fence sitters find it a bit depressing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was a top down centrally planned economy. The federal government set quotas for production and prices. This was made possible through the war production board which converted civilian companies to wartime use:
"Gasoline, meat, and clothing were tightly rationed. Most families were allocated 3 US gallons (11 l; 2.5 imp gal) of gasoline a week, which sharply curtailed driving for any purpose. Production of most durable goods, like new housing, vacuum cleaners, and kitchen appliances, was banned until the war ended.[1] In industrial areas housing was in short supply as people doubled up and lived in cramped quarters. Prices and wages were controlled."
It was very much top-down. Most of the production was nominally done by private contractors, but the federal government forced existing factories to be converted to war production, fronted the money to build new factories, directly built public housing for the factory workers, and fixed wages and consumer prices.
> existing factories to be converted to war production
And some amusing artifacts were produced as a result of that. For example, the M1 Carbine was manufactured among others by IBM, Rock-Ola, and the National Postal Meter Company. After the war, these became collector items of sorts, since the manufacturer name is prominent on all of them.
One example of top down mobilization was the mass manufacture of aircraft for World War II. This Fox Business video [1] shows how Roosevelt's advisors found the top industry guys to analyze the artisanal manufacture of B-17 bombers, design and build an assembly line factory, and mass produce the bombers at a rate of one an hour.
After the war, Ford made a promotional film, "The Story of Willow Run" [2], that shows the progression from soybean farm to aircraft factory, the redesign of the bomber for manufacturing, and the assembly line processes. The YouTube comments from factory worker descendants are fascinating.
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.
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.
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.
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.
