How a Dumb Protectionist Law from 1920 Still Screws People from New Jersey to Hawaii

NPR has a story about how The
Jones Act, a 1920 law designed to protect the U.S. shipping
industry from foreign competition, has made it difficult for New
Jersey to get large shipments of road salt this winter. The Garden
State could have brought 40,000 tons of salt down from Maine on a
single ship, saving time and money during one of the toughest
winters in memory, but instead has to ferry a barge capable of
handling shipments of under 10,000 tons back and forth, adding
costs and delays.

[New Jersey officials] bought the salt but ran into problems
getting it to New Jersey — despite the fact that there was an
enormous, empty cargo ship, sitting at the Searsport port, headed
down to Newark.

“I mean, it was just like serendipity,” says Joe Dee, chief of
staff with the New Jersey Department of Transportation. “Here’s
this ship that’s big enough to take 40,000 tons of salt, on its way
to Newark anyway. This is perfect.”

But standing between that pile of salt and the port of Newark
was an ancient law. Stemming back to the 1600s, reaffirmed in its
modern form in 1920, it’s called, the Jones Act. Under the Jones
Act, if you want to bring something from one U.S. port to another,
you have to use an American-built ship, flying an American flag,
with a mostly American crew.

Read
more here.

The argument in favor of The Jones Act – a weak one, to be sure
– is that ship-building and sailoring more generally is related to
defending the country. We’ve got to keep a strong ship-building
industry on our shores, say defenders, so we can conscript it in
time of war. Seriously.

It’s not just folks in frigid New Jersey who are suffering
because of a dumb old law. The NPR story touches on how The Jones
Act screws over Hawaii especially. Thanks to this form of
protectionism, residents of America’s furtherst-flung state
routinely pay 15 percent to 20 percent more for goods that come
from the mainland.

Last May, Reason TV talked to Hawaiian legislators about “How
Protectionism Hurts Hawaii: Why It’s Time to Repeal the Jones Act.”
Check it out now: