The Jones Act at 100: Time to Make This Protectionist Law History

Colin Grabow andInu ManakTheJones Act turned 100  years old last week. While numerous lawmakers rushed to pay homage to it, we’ve opted, as trade policy analysts, for a different approach: the release of an edited volume,The Case against the Jones Act,which delves into the costs of the law and the founding myths and false narratives its supporters have used to perpetuate it. One of these myths has to do with the Jones Act ’s very origins. As commonly told, the law dates back to the aftermath of the First World War and a desire to shore up the U.S. commercial fleet. But that is, at best, an incomplete picture. The Jones Act’s real story is far more sordid. To properly understand the law, one must first go back to the very founding of the republic.Meeting in 1789, one of Congress ’s first acts was to encourage the use of American ships to carry U.S. commerce through the use of discriminatory taxes and tariffs. But this took place in a very different environment. At the time, U.S. shipbuilders and sailors were among the world’s best, both in terms of cost and quality. U. S. ships were so competitive thatsome scholars have gone so far as to argue that these measures encouraging their use were essentially cost ‐​free.Beyond the measure ’s low cost, a national security calculus also no doubt loomed in Congress’s thinking. In the recently‐​concluded Revolutionary War, repurposed merchant ships sailing under the U.S. flag—so-called privateers—captured o...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs