My impression was that most opposition to the jones act was that it has not really worked, and as a side effect drastically reduced the intra-us shipping industry.
Without the jones act, we would not have a ship building boom, but we probably would have more intra-US shipping via ship/rivers/etc.
I agree, without the Jones Act we would have much more inter-coastal shipping but that was not what the grandparent was claiming:
>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 Jones Act, and the reduction in demand that it triggered, hasn’t prevented
>>and in fact probably caused—the closure of 300 domestic shipyards since the >>early 1980s.
and from comments:
>The problem is, the Jones Act has harmed our shipbuilding capacity as well.
>According to the artcle our ship building capacity is 1% of China's and US >built ships cost 6-8 times as much. That's not helpful.
So there is this narrative that if we just get rid of the restrictions, suddenly we will become competitive.
In another thread, someone mentioned that we just had an election between a TV personality and the other a fake persona : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42931904 and how we need to stop electing elites.
That in a nutshell is why Trump was able to win, he is not viewed as an elite and everything he sets out to do, the elites are screaming "THAT WON"T WORK!!!".
3 years ago, the same establishment types were saying "No inflation", "Well...transitory inflation" to "Well, the rate of inflation is back to where we set our targets" and "GDP is at the highest levels ever!" while everyone is asking if we are stepping into a recession.
I don't agree with a lot of what he is doing, however I do agree that we need to do something different. Our previous leaders and policy makers set us on a path where labor is not valued, unions are despised and greed is good. You can't run a society without labor and protections(both for workers and environmental) and a strict focus on wealth alone leads you to a desolate place.
Without the jones act, we would not have a ship building boom, but we probably would have more intra-US shipping via ship/rivers/etc.