Comedian and political satirist Andrew Heaton recently turned his sights on the Jones Act for some deserved mockery. The result is both funny and informative:

There is only so much information that can be conveyed in just six minutes, however, and some of Heaton’s points merit further elaboration. To pick a few:

“By limiting which ships can schlepp stuff between our ports it makes shipping more expensive. Which makes stuff more expensive, particularly for places like Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, or any new floaty states I haven’t learned about yet.”

While the Jones Act harms all Americans, the burden falls disproportionately heavily on the non-contiguous parts of the county where alternative forms of transport such as road and rail are either limited (Alaska) or non-existent (Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico). That’s not just harmful, but unfair—particularly so in the case of Puerto Rico, which has no vote in Congress and suffers from a 43 percent poverty rate. If supporting the U.S. merchant fleet is a national security imperative, then the costs should be more evenly shared by all Americans and not just those highly dependent on domestic shipping.

“Protectionism has a big problem, though: it doesn’t work.”

Indeed. Under the protection of a U.S.-built mandate that dates to 1817, domestic shipbuilding’s competitiveness has eroded to the point where U.S.-built merchant ships cost 4–5 times as much as those built abroad. With few takers for such expensive ships, U.S. commercial shipbuilding is a mere 0.2 percent of global output despite having vessels used within the world’s largest economy as a captive market.

The expense of purchasing these U.S.-built ships, along with high operating costs, means an inability to compete against other forms of transportation. As a result, the number of Jones Act ships has dwindled. The Jones Act isn’t just a burden on the U.S. economy but has also failed the very sector whose fortunes it was meant to promote.

“Instead, because we’ve made shipping more costly, we rely on trucks, which are more expensive and carbon-intensive than ships.”

Trucks are far more carbon-intensive than ships, and shifting more domestic freight transport from land to water could offer considerable environmental benefits. For more on this topic, please see economist Timothy Fitzgerald’s 2020 policy analysis “The Environmental Costs of the Jones Act.”

“We’re a net exporter of natural gas, and yet in 2019—because there weren’t enough pipes to transport gas from southern states to Massachusetts, nor enough Jones Act-compliant vessels to do so—Massachusetts had to import it from Russia.”

It’s true. And the importation of foreign liquefied natural gas (LNG) into Massachusetts continues apace, with 12 cargoes delivered in 2020 and another 6 so far this year despite plentiful domestic supplies and an LNG export facility less than two days sailing distance away in Maryland. Transporting the energy source within the United States by water, however, is impossible due to the total absence of LNG tankers in the Jones Act fleet.

That’s a problem for Puerto Rico as well, which is forced to meet its bulk LNG needs entirely from abroad even while neighboring Dominican Republic last year purchased roughly half of its supplies from the United States. That Puerto Rico doesn’t buy U.S. LNG isn’t despite being part of the United States, but because it is part of the United States and thus subject to the Jones Act.

“Whenever we have a crisis, the government temporarily rescinds the Jones Act so that shippers can cheaply and quickly get food and materials and laudanum into the affected area.”

Since 2005 the federal government has waived the Jones Act following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, as well as more recently during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown. While waivers of the law are welcome, the decision to suspend the law—invariably politicized—wastes precious days during crisis situations when time is of the essence. The waiver of the Jones Act following Hurricane Maria, for example, was not issued until more than a week after the storm made landfall in Puerto Rico. Effective crisis response demands options and flexibility, and the Jones Act means less of both.

For more about the Jones Act, please visit the Cato Institute’s dedicated webpage.