The Jones Act has already made Hawaii's economy really difficult, but it might be about to get really worse. Hawaii gets a third or more crude oil from Russia, and with recent sanctions, it's unclear if that will continue. If it doesn't that means Hawaii will need to purchase much more expensive oil from the mainland.
> It is much cheaper for Hawaii to buy oil from Russia than from the U.S., even though the per-barrel cost of oil from Russia is more expensive than from Texas.
> Blame the Jones Act. The 1920 federal maritime law requires all goods shipped between American ports to be on vessels that are U.S. flagged, built and mostly owned and crewed by Americans.
> The result of more than a century of protectionism has been that U.S. ships are more expensive to build and operate, with the additional costs inevitably passed on to consumers. In other words, the added cost of using American ships makes it more expensive for Hawaii to buy oil from Texas than from Russia. [1]
I don't get this doom and gloom. The population of Hawaii is 1.3 million, a third of the oil is from Russia. That is minuscule on the world scale. Oil is an extremely liquid trade, and Hawaii is already buying non Jones act oil.
Jones Act itself is a problem, and a blessing. It ensures a US maritime industry but has due to lack of competition left it so far behind the world standard that the minute it is removed the entire sector will go bankrupt from international competition.
The Decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine | What's Going on With Shipping?
I wonder why we don't have more laws that gradually change things. Like instead of having jones act or no jones act as the only two options what if we could slowly remove the jones act at a rate of 3% per year or whatever? It could begin to improve things for people but also give the domestic industry some time to adapt.
>> Jones Act itself is a problem, and a blessing. It ensures a US maritime industry but has due to lack of competition left it so far behind the world standard that the minute it is removed the entire sector will go bankrupt from international competition.
> I wonder why we don't have more laws that gradually change things. Like instead of having jones act or no jones act as the only two options what if we could slowly remove the jones act at a rate of 3% per year or whatever? It could begin to improve things for people but also give the domestic industry some time to adapt.
Because maybe that would just draw out the failure, while still failing to achieve some of the main goals of the Jones Act?
Economic "efficiency" is not the only goal that should be pursued, which the events of the last few years should have made clear.
I'm pretty sure "the world standard" for shipping is low pay and workers getting treated like crap.
In any sector of the economy where you don't have protectionism, it quickly becomes a "race to the bottom" where companies move to the least regulated places where there's no minimum wage; various forms of worker abuse are legal; and there's basically no safety / environmental protection.
> Jones Act itself is a problem, and a blessing. It ensures a US maritime industry but has due to lack of competition left it so far behind the world standard that the minute it is removed the entire sector will go bankrupt from international competition.
It's too bad we didn't have something like this for manufacturing, too. If we'd kept key component assembly in the US, we could've adapted to supply chain disruptions or unfavorable trading partnerships.
Our nation should be able to sustain itself as a hedge against a multitude of geopolitical risks as well as lay sandbags against the erosion of economic power.
I agree. On a related topic, I think it's important that we have some low cost software developer labor to make sure that we have the ability to develop things cheaply and compete with other countries.
I propose that we start by reducing your salary by 40% so that we've got some lower cost labor. It's miniscule on the world scale, so you shouldn't complain I suppose? I don't get the doom and gloom.
Honestly and unironically yes, this sounds great. I don't want to build a career on protectionism. I would start a company tomorrow if quality software development labor was 40% cheaper, it would make so many use cases economical.
I am confused, how would a 40% reduction of current software salaries in the US for top talent due to competition mean exploiting people?
Are you against training more doctors too because they would make less money and therefore be more exploited? What about the people who buy their services? Or do I misunderstand?
There certainly are exploitive labor practices but I don't think being for decreasing the costs of a profession due to free competition has to be equated to being for exploiting people of that profession.
I think that many industries and use cases could benefit from software automation, but it is expensive to hire those people. If they are good there is endless demand for their skills in ad tech alone, where they can afford to pay them a salary and benefits valued over 20-30% of the gross profit that entire company brings in a year.
Is not that the thing? Working in software I am already competing with the world. My job could get out-sourced tomorrow, but apparently that does not happen.
See the difference? Value vs. cost. Very different.
The problem is the US has to maintain payment schemes including SWIFT with Russia in order to use their oil. So it makes blocking them from the system difficult.
Valid criticism. But how would the USA maintain a merchant fleet in the face of much lower operation costs for operators under a different flag? Without the Jones Act, one might expect near-complete dependence on foreign-flagged ships for US shipping. That's a major vulnerability for a trade-oriented nation. Subsidies perhaps?
Yeah but people complain about all sorts of stuff.
We haven’t gotten rid of the subsidies yet.
Although in this scenario, we could subsidize oil to Hawaii. I don’t know how that could be sold but everyone already benefits from subsidies somewhere and everyone already subsidizes something else.
And not only Hawaii, many other places too. The costs fell on Puerto Rico when Congress refused to lift the Jones requirements to ease shipping costs even after the hurricane left them desperate for supplies. I guess the national priority fo ensuring a home-based merchant marine fleet outweighed people's need for toilet paper and medical supplies.
Modify the Jones act so that the ships don't need to be built in the US, they just need to be owned and flagged by US companies. Labor costs for running the ships are a rounding error when compared to the purchase price of the ship and fuel costs. You just don't need that many people to run these large ships and you can already have ~30% of staff be foreign anyway.
Why would the USA maintain a merchant fleet if it not economically feasible?
Why are operation costs lower for operators under a different flag?
How does disadvantaging internal transport help anyone involved other than a handful of specialty operators?
The Jones Act requires goods shipped between U.S. ports to be transported on ships that are built, owned, and operated by United States citizens or permanent residents.[0]
We want to maintain domestic shipyard capacity and not have the only shipyards be those that are government contractors. Why? Imagine if we are ever in a situation where we need Liberty Ships again.
2. transported on ships that are owned,
We want to both protect domestic owners as well as be able to hold them accountable if they screw up. You sometimes hear stories about ships abandoned by their owners and the crew forced to stay on the vessel. Or abandoned cargo such as the fertilizer that caused the Beirut blast. We want to minimize those situations.
3. transported on ships that are operated
We want the people working the ships to be invested in our country and we want to maintain a population with these skills. Why? In the event of a Liberty Ship situation, you need people to crew them. But also accountability, who is more likely to report the captain ordering waste oil to be dumped overboard: A US citizen who knows the rules or a sailor from Indonesia whose passport is being held by the captain?
There is a large amount of intercostal and waterway shipping that takes place in the US, grain down the Mississippi, steel on the Great Lakes. Do we want that to be open to Iranian or North Korean ships?
Lastly, the Jones Act only applies to goods shipped between US ports. So if Hawaii is buying Russian gas from Russia, as long as the ship goes from Russia to Hawaii the Jones Act doesn't apply.
I can see how it is important for any nation to maintain strategic capabilities in many domains. Since the US is largely a single-continent nation, maintaining a strategic shipping capacity seems less important than other things, but arguably has a greater than zero significance.
The Jones Act disadvantages non-shipping parts of the economy in order to prop up some otherwise unviable operations. In the case of Hawaii, this is especially terrible since US sources of goods and material might be competitive with Russia or elsewhere except for the transportation. The result "costs Hawaii $1.2 billion annually, including 9,100 fewer jobs and $148 million in unrealized tax revenues." [0]
Ship ownership has nothing to do with port safety and a Lebanese Jones Act equivalent would not have changed anything in Beirut since it was international shipping impounded by Lebanon, offloaded and improperly stored in the port for many years. [1]
A single continent is another way of saying an island, and while shipping via air is routine now, ocean shipping is by and large the way we move goods in and out of our country. You can see how much it is by looking at how the ports are backed up right now.
Correct the Beirut explosion was cause by international shipping not domestic but my argument was that if you do not have safeguards then you will have more chances of something like that happening. Small backwater and intercostal ports in the US might not have the resources to deal with abandoned ships and cargo in the way that out international ports do.
Your mention of air shipping and the difference between domestic and international ports is well taken. As I understand it, foreign aircraft operators are likewise prohibited from inter-domestic flights. Maybe it all makes sense in a Chesterton's fence sort of way.
> Why would the USA maintain a merchant fleet if it not economically feasible?
Basically the same reason Japan subsidizes grain production or why Sweden doesn't buy its fighter jets from Russia. Sure, it'd be cheaper to import, but it's also a vulnerability.
It would make America dependent on foreign powers for the shipping of goods vital to the economy and even national security. How do you move oil to Hawaii and military hardware to Guam if foreign carriers decide to embargo the USA?
> Why are operation costs lower for operators under a different flag?
A ship flagged under country X has to obey the laws of country X. So a Liberian flagged ship has to obey the laws of Liberia. The minimum wages in Liberia is much less then the US. Overtime rules more relaxed. Safety standards are more relaxed.
Solar is already so prevalent on Oahu that they have grid frequency excursions that would be unimaginable on the mainland.
Once grid-scale energy storage gets cheaper Hawaii will have one of the cleanest energy grids on Earth. Until then they have to complement their solar production with peaker turbines that typically burn diesel.
Hawaii does have a geothermal plant. It got covered in lava during a 2018 eruption and took two years to dig back out. Not sure if that's a freak incident or ill portent for its viability in Hawaii. Pre-eruption it supplied about 10% of the state's electricity.
Hawaii (the island) can and does, but most of Hawaii (the state)'s electric demand is on Oahu where they haven't found any geothermal that's viable for making power.
Loopholes in the law are like security flaws in programs. Whenever the letter of the law (code) doesn't exactly match the intent, inevitably some attacker will find it and exploit it, especially if there is monetary incentive as is the case in business. This doesn't mean the law is wrong, just that the people who wrote it were careless and didn't think about all the edge cases. What most democratic governments lack is a way to do a quick security update to zero-day loopholes as they are found. These things shouldn't be fixed with years-long lawsuits arguing the intent of the law, they should be fixed with a patch to the actual wording of the law so the intent is more clear.
Keep in mind that there is an intelligent cut-out in the system: the judiciary. They exist because the law is not a computer program and because loopholes are not like security flaws. In this case, the DoJ (officially) noticed the situation in August 2021, meaning the judiciary has not had time to work its magic. When they do so, they will evaluate a stack of arguments about the meaning and results of the law (in a non-computation sense of "evaluate" and "stack"); what they will not do is interpret the law like a series of if-then statements.
At that point, legislators can then "patch" the law if they feel it necessary. (Do you realize exactly how bad "a quick security update to zero-day loopholes as they are found" would be?)
(Knowing only the facts in the article, I would be willing to bet that some judge is going to say, "haha, yeah, good try, but no." But then I don't know all of the facts of the case.)
Typically when a judge says no to a case like this, they have to come up with a definition of something in the law that is not met. For example, they may say "It does not qualify as travel on a railway if the load does not travel from one station to another station. In this case, since the loading and unloading occurred at the same station, this load did not travel by rail, and therefore the Jones Act was violated".
That new decision then becomes part of the law (case law).
Even worse, the precedent-based legal system is quite crazy itself, especially to those who lives in the continental legal system. Instead of patching "code" (law) to new times and sometimes removing parts of it completely, the former uses age-old execution artifacts (court decisions) to determine future execution. Not only it bloats "code" with a truck load of pattern matching branches instead of using a lean algorithm, but it also makes it much harder to consciously evolve the system, which is especially important in the current times.
>The reliance on judicial opinion is a strength of common law systems, and is a significant contributor to the robust commercial systems in the United Kingdom and United States. Because there is reasonably precise guidance on almost every issue, parties (especially commercial parties) can predict whether a proposed course of action is likely to be lawful or unlawful, and have some assurance of consistency.[76] As Justice Brandeis famously expressed it, "in most matters it is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right."[77] This ability to predict gives more freedom to come close to the boundaries of the law.[78] For example, many commercial contracts are more economically efficient, and create greater wealth, because the parties know ahead of time that the proposed arrangement, though perhaps close to the line, is almost certainly legal. Newspapers, taxpayer-funded entities with some religious affiliation, and political parties can obtain fairly clear guidance on the boundaries within which their freedom of expression rights apply.
>In contrast, in jurisdictions with very weak respect for precedent,[79] fine questions of law are redetermined anew each time they arise, making consistency and prediction more difficult, and procedures far more protracted than necessary because parties cannot rely on written statements of law as reliable guides.[76] In jurisdictions that do not have a strong allegiance to a large body of precedent, parties have less a priori guidance (unless the written law is very clear and kept updated) and must often leave a bigger "safety margin" of unexploited opportunities, and final determinations are reached only after far larger expenditures on legal fees by the parties.
>procedures far more protracted than necessary because parties cannot rely on written statements of law as reliable guides
I would say it's a problem with laws, not the system itself. Also the continental system does not imply that precedents do not have any force. The difference is that when a law changes the system accumulates new precedents for it instead of using outdated ones.
Imagine a world where there was one law, "be good to each other," and the rest was judicial precedent. What would be the problems?
1. There would be no centralized repository of what the laws were.
2. Even the best interpretation of existing precedent could be wrong or overturned, making any action potentially illegal.
3. The size of the entire corpus would grow with every case and make knowing what the law was only possible for people with a lot of law clerks to research it. The complexity of definitions could grow without bound.
it's not a loophole, the law says they have to ship via rail from a different country so that's exactly what they are doing. if the law specifies a minimum distance they will build a circular track and run the train long enough to meet the minimum distance. If it specifies track length they will just build track that long, if it specifies minimum geographic distance they will find a further port.
The law is stupid, so this is what it incentivizes, the Jones act is like a Soviet Nail factory.
My business gets credits from our vendors if we bring customers from other competitors, if it's a new customer we have a vendor we work with that provides very cheap options so we sign them up with a competitor, before onboarding them with the vendor. If the customer is with one of our existing vendors we switch them to a different one. EVERYONE is happy, all our vendor reps are making their numbers, executives are making their competitive advances, even the cheap company is making bank because none of the customers ever even use the service.
I'm not sure why you say this is not a loophole. What you're describing is exactly what a loophole is. A loophole means exploiting the technicalities of the letter of the law to dodge its intent.
> If it specifies track length they will just build track that long, if it specifies minimum geographic distance they will find a further port.
I wonder what the law would have to say to produce the legislators' intended result. Possibly they could require companies to define, for each journey:
* Point A - the average(?) location of where the fish are caught, and
* Point B - the average(?) location where the fish are sold to the public or stored (for the majority of the time they are stored).
Then there could be some requirement that there be two points, C and D, with the following properties:
* the fish pass through points C and D on their way from point A to point B,
* points C and D are on the main Canadian rail network (such that most rail track in Canada can be reached by a train starting at point C or point D),
* the minimum rail distance between points C and D is some percentage P of the straight line distance between A and B, and
* the fish travel only by rail between points C and D.
The precise value of "P" would have to be chosen by looking at examples of intended paths and thinking of possible unintended paths.
The difference is lawyers are paid to find loopholes. And to persuade judges and juries their creative interpretation is valid.
Software lacks the persuasion element. The CPU either runs the code or it doesn't. You fix edge cases by making all possible states explicit, not by arguing with the CPU that it should do something differently to set a precedent.
A trade-off here is that it seems unlikely for a legal team to be able to humanly attempt tens of thousands of slight variants of a legal argument and still be allowed to participate, whereas with computers and network services, fuzzing tends to scale and continue fairly reliably (partly because it often goes unnoticed).
Who are the 'users' of a law? A government might pass a law to reduce air pollution from factories. Obviously this is 'misaligned' with the interests of factory owners, who will seek out loopholes to exploit. However it may be very well aligned with the interests of citizens at large.
Let us consider the users of a law are those entities which are primarily affected by it. A loophole is a legal method that can only be used by some users that gives them some advantage over other users.
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has made several high-profile rulings in line with this kind of thinking. They've punted a few cases on the grounds that it's the job of Congress to fix certain types of problems and Congress needs to get its act together.
This is why most good laws are written with the understanding that disputes will be solved by a complicated neural network that draws on distributed resources for consensus.
Yeah, but the intent isn’t something the legislature knows. The outcome is the intent - since there are multiple participants and they are negotiating.
> What most democratic governments lack is a way to do a quick security update to zero-day loopholes as they are found
That's not necessarily true. The solution is to give regulatory agencies more leeway to enforce and shutdown these violations. It's only really cultural bias against "big government" (and towards letter-of-the-law rather than spirit-of-the-law style enforcement) that prevents this. If you are consistent enough about doing this, then you massively disincentivise companies from exploiting these loopholes in the first place as they know they're likely to get heavily penalised for it.
This is very slippery slope. It is not my friggin job to figure out the "spirit of the law". I can read letter of law and follow it. If law makers lack mental capacity to "stress test" their creations and incorporate "patches" when bugs are discovered they should find some other job.
Otherwise everyone will be on the hook for some imaginary "not following spirit". Might as well hire shamans
There is a grey area between the letter and intent of the law but it takes a special sort of wilful misinterpretation to end up with "driving onto a little cart that goes about two hundred feet along a rail, then comes back" as "travelling by rail". Especially when there is apparently a whole pile of paperwork that had to be done to officially register this little cart as A Canadian Rail Line. These people know damn well what the spirit of the law is and put a lot of time and effort into coming up with a way to violate the spirit but not the letter of it.
The only way you can get to that point via a slippery slope is to bring your own barrels of lubricant and spend a while clearing rocks and trees and other obstacles off of your slope. You might even have to put some effort into increasing the grade of that slope.
Hopefully the courts will decide that while this may not violate the precise letter of the law, it's incredibly obvious that it violates the spirit of it, and judge them guilty. But if they do, this company will probably try to push it back to a higher court, given that the initial fines are 90% of their revenue from a few years ago.
I wonder how much they saved by doing this stupid game instead of using actual rail shipping for about thirty miles, and how much of it ended up in the pockets of their top-level staff and investors vs. the pockets of their employees?
It's a slippery slope in both directions. In one direction you give power to governmental organisations. In the other you give power to corporations. Neither of those things are good from the point of view of democracy.
IMO the fact that US culture is utterly intolerant of any kind of "spirit of the law" governance is one of the reasons why America can't have nice things. It's regulatory bodies have other problems, but one of the main ones is that they are toothless because they generally aren't given any real power. Where they are (such as the FAA), they're often much more effective.
Nope. Once caught bug in law, fix it. But don't punish people / corps for failure to "guess". One more time. Iam not law maker and it is not my job.
>"that US culture is utterly intolerant"
I am in Canada. Not the US.
>"why America can't have nice things"
I do not get it. Sure there is a lot of awful thing in the US. And an awful lot of good things as well. Just as everywhere (assuming developed countries).
> But don't punish people / corps for failure to "guess".
You don't punish people for failure to guess (you may warn them if necessary). You punish people for flagrantly violating the law. Do you really think the creators of the railroad in this article didn't know that this wasn't what the law intended? It's infeasible to update laws in response to every violation - the process takes too long - so we need a lighter weight process that can keep up. You keep that process in check by updating laws where it oversteps the mark.
' US culture is utterly intolerant of any kind of "spirit of the law" governance ...'
yet USA tolerates government immunity which leads to government bad actors having little fear of being successfully sued.
US lawsuit culture is a whole other kettle of fish! I agree that government officials shouldn't have special protections that others don't have. On the other hand, I feel like an approach where there was greater collective responsibility such that suing individuals wasn't such a large part of the culture would be a huge benefit. For example, better health coverage such that individuals aren't on the hook for other people's medical bills.
Reminds me of when people routinely (and entirely legally) use tax loopholes to avoid paying tax. The problem is that no one even tries to pay a dime more taxes than is legally necessary.
And yet those people are routinely attacked instead of the laws themselves, which to me seems completely absurd. A person should no sooner pay "the spirit of" the amount of tax they "should" owe, than the IRS would forgive a restaurant some tax during the pandemic since "the spirit of" tax wouldn't sink businesses temporarily set back by pandemics.
Except when those people fight against any proposed changes to the regulation, or actively influence the development of the legislation in the first place, at which point many people perceive them as using their resources to further entrench their privilege.
It seems the truck gets off at the same point it got on, that may be a critical flaw in their trick as it can be argued the rail line didn't provide "part of the journey".
Is there a video of them loading that truck onto the train? It seems like two ramps on both ends would make that easier and avoid what you pointed out.
Repealing or reforming the Jones Act would really help river cities all along the mississippi river system. It would also reduce co2 and traffic congestion. It's amazing to me that no one will take a critical look at this outdated law. It's anti competitive and disproportionately affects interior states.
"The Bureaucracy is expanding to support the needs of the expanding Bureaucracy." - Leonard Nimoy, Civ IV (Oh and originally some old guy. Edited for accuracy.)
ahh... the Irvings, petrochemical and politics
they showed up here on HN not that long ago (4 months) in conjunction with the mysterious chronic wasting disease in the same area
Ignoring the primary issue Uncle Sam has with this logistics solution, be reminded why laws and or regulations exist for things... there's always someone (right or wrong) that will circumvent the rules with shall we say... creative solutions.
This is where judges and spirit of the law come in. Laws hav always been imprecise and one remedy for that are judges and trials. I doubt what the company is doing will hold up in court if they want to argue that they satisfied the provision of the Jones Act.
I really love creative workarounds for ridiculous rules. Like many of our laws the Jones Act is trying to force a desirable outcome because the existing laws forced people to adopt the undesirable outcome. In this case US laws make it too costly to operate a US flagged vessel. Instead of removing laws that were making it too costly we just added a new law to try to force operators to the desirable but costly path of being US flagged.
If a law is preventing us from being globally competitive it is a bad law.
There are some pretty obvious drawbacks to this that you seem to be deliberately ignoring.
For example, in cases where this competitive advantage is gained through means that cause what a reasonable person would considered an excess of human suffering and the relevant US laws prevent the actions that gain that competitive advantage in exchange for human suffering, does it make sense to submit that this human suffering is just a fact of life or would it be better to attempt to eliminate that suffering?
I had thought of those cases but didn't mention them as I feel most people would agree that those are "good" laws and accept the consequences. However, there are currently vastly more laws and regulations that do not fit in that category. There is a lot of space between sacrificing decency and removing law/regulation cruft to improve competitiveness.
This comment is much more nuanced than your original black-and-white "If a law is preventing us from being globally competitive it is a bad law." I appreciate the followup.
I'm fine with global competition if it isn't arbitrage of environmental regulations.
That used to be palatable to Americans when the polluting resulting from manufacturing their kewpie dolls in Walmart was a local concern of the third world factory.
But global warming pollution isn't localized.
Thus "being globally competitive" amounts to code words for bypassing environmental regulations and further dooming the entire human race. That is a big big big issue.
So while this is amusing and farcical, loopholes are dangerous at industrial scale.
This is why programmers think they can treat the law like code. Because people often do and get away with it. Often they don’t get away with it, too. But still… programmers aren’t the only ones looking at the law this way apparently.
So, am I understanding correctly that using US ships to go from, say, Alaska to Washington State and then on to wherever is necessary in the US is more expensive than hiring a foreign company to sail the cargo down to Panama, across the canal, back up to Canada, across 300 feet of railway, and then into the US? If so, I would not have guessed that were the case.
Objections were raised at the time about the potential disruption of pre-existing patterns of travel of both passengers and merchandise in part over Canadian rail lines.
To address those objections, a proviso was added to the restated coastwise law – then the “first proviso” – which stated that the coastwise restriction did not apply to transportation “over through routes heretofore or hereafter recognized by the Interstate Commerce Commission for which routes rate tariffs have been or shall hereafter be filed with said commission when such routes are in part over Canadian rail lines . . .” – and “excluding Alaska.”
In 1935 this proviso was interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court which wrote that “its evident purpose was to avoid disturbance of established routes, recognized by the Interstate Commerce Commission as in the public interest, between Northwestern and Eastern states through the lake ports.”
End quote.
The TLDR seems to be that forcing it for rail would have caused too many disturbances to how the rail was operating at the time.
Jones Act is a bunch of bullshit. Its right up there with Sugar duties, Car dealership laws, Alcohol distributorship laws, and corn subsidies as bullshit insider manipulation of the market to line their own pockets.
It used to seem to me that there was a strong libertarian tendency among computer people, at least relative to the rest of society.
I always attributed this to the fact that anyone who has ever tried to tell a computer what to do has a different kind of understanding of how hard it is to precisely define intentions, even when the compiler doesn't have a personal financial or other incentive to deliberately misconstrue your code so as to create a bug.
It doesn't matter how beneficial is the intention of your law, it'll really only work if it's generally aligned with the local cultural values -- in which case people will Do What You Mean.
Politicians either don't understand this, or pretend not to; you regularly see them passing laws to outlaw things that are already illegal.
> It is much cheaper for Hawaii to buy oil from Russia than from the U.S., even though the per-barrel cost of oil from Russia is more expensive than from Texas.
> Blame the Jones Act. The 1920 federal maritime law requires all goods shipped between American ports to be on vessels that are U.S. flagged, built and mostly owned and crewed by Americans.
> The result of more than a century of protectionism has been that U.S. ships are more expensive to build and operate, with the additional costs inevitably passed on to consumers. In other words, the added cost of using American ships makes it more expensive for Hawaii to buy oil from Texas than from Russia. [1]
[1] https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/2022/02/jones-act-threate...