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Charles Cooke gives details of just how much of our modern, convenient lives depend upon data centers. A slice:

Certainly, we wildly underestimate the extent to which we rely on data centers. Take my actions today. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and looked through National Review’s website. To get there, I typed “nationalreview.com” into my browser, and before I’d even hit “Enter,” my computer used a data center to look up where that site was located on the web. Once that location had been discovered, my browser then contacted the website via its primary IP address — which, in the case of a popular site such as National Review, meant a digital “visit” to whichever one of the many “proxy” data centers happened to be geographically closest to me. After a secure connection to that data center had been established, my browser then started assembling the text, images, videos, podcasts, fonts, scripts, advertisements, and other elements that made up the page I hoped to see. Because this involved all manner of different content types — some cached, some dynamic, some streaming — and required the use of application servers, database servers, and distributed content-delivery networks, it invariably required trips to multiple data centers, all playing different roles. Thus, before I had read a single word, my computer had been served 150 web requests, across 34 domains, having contacted roughly ten data centers spread across networks operated by nine different companies. Because everything worked as it should have, this process was invisible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Without seeing it, I had taken a remarkable journey around the world.

And that’s just for a visit to the homepage of a website. Presumably, like me, you have a smartphone. Have you ever thought about how it works? At the same time that I was visiting nationalreview.com today, my phone was relentlessly pinging data centers across the globe. An email arrived, a message appeared in the family group chat, a video from yesterday finished uploading to the cloud: those actions were the result of data centers, data centers, and — yep — data centers. When my weather widget refreshed its forecast, my calendar picked up a change to an appointment, one of my apps downloaded an update, and my stock ticker moved: data centers did that. Each one of the little conveniences that I have slowly stacked over time involved computers in one or more data centers doing work on my behalf. Magic? Not on your life.

Having had my coffee, I ran some errands in my car, and as usual, I used Waze to avoid the traffic. In so doing, I blithely connected to an unfathomably impressive piece of infrastructure — all of which remained out of sight. My phone accurately calculated its position on Earth by listening to a series of precisely timed signals sent from a bunch of satellites up in space and comparing the data issued by each to determine where I was. At the same time, its internet connection linked it to a host of servers that, among other things, supplied the requisite maps, calculated optimal directions, and processed real-time traffic information that had been collected from other drivers. To obtain even the simplest of instructions — “turn left” — I was the beneficiary of signals from space, mathematics in my pocket, and information that had been processed by distant computers in data centers across the world. While driving, I turned on Apple Music, and thanks to a data center nearby, I had at my disposal virtually all of the music that has ever been recorded. On my way home, I made a phone call to my wife and thereby relied on a data center in my carrier’s network to connect us and route my conversation to the right place. Had I driven through a toll, a data center would have matched my transponder to my billing record. If I’d stopped for gas or lunch and paid by card, the payment would have been authorized by my bank’s data centers. All this, for a simple trip to the barber!

We take all this for granted. Once, we had to go to the bank to cash a check, wait on the phone to buy a plane ticket, take a trip to a shop to buy a light bulb, drive to a video store to rent a movie, call theaters for showtimes, and consult encyclopedias to find the most elementary of facts. We don’t now — because of data centers. On Sundays, during NFL season, I watch the games over the internet on my TV, which requires a lot of data centers; I participate in two fantasy football leagues and one pick ’em league, all of which are hosted in data centers; and, like many others, I text my friends during the games — via a data center, naturally. So reflexive is this behavior that we have forgotten how it works. But we’d notice if it went away. If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.

The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another data center, that is maintained by another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.

Paul Schwennesen isn’t impressed with the new book by Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer. A slice:

Hanauer and Beinhocker describe “Market Humanism” as a new paradigm “grounded in twenty-first century thinking.” What that means isn’t clear, but they argue that the “old paradigm” — economics as the study of how society manages its scarce resources — has “constrained economic thinking for the past 150 years.”  They propose instead an economics centered on human flourishing, in which “markets are servants, not masters,” and argue that the real genius of markets lies less in their efficiency at allocating existing resources, but rather in their ability to generate innovation. Erm… paging Dr. Schumpeter to address the blindingly obvious. He wrote, way back in 1942, of the “perennial gale of creative destruction” that allows continuous innovation across the entire economy.

There is, moreover, an odd tension at play.  Hanauer himself readily acknowledges that market capitalism has been astonishingly successful. “No social technology,” he writes, “has done more to create prosperity and raise living standards” than market capitalism. Human beings, he notes, are now leading substantially longer, healthier, more comfortable, more fulfilling lives than at any other time in history.

So what, exactly, is the old paradigm failing to explain?

Despite the window dressing, I suspect Hanauer’s answer is that it fails to justify the political case for greater taxation of the uber-rich. The simplest way to summarize Hanauer and Beinhocker’s “very different model,” then, might be “market capitalism with socialist characteristics.” And maybe they have a point — if the basic problem with traditional market capitalism is that it has been too successful, and that the risk of toppling our social edifice at the altar of envy is acute, then maybe we should take the argument seriously.

Tad DeHaven and Chad Smitson report on the increasing number of private companies with shares now owned by the U.S. government.

Reem Ibrahim is right that “Rand Paul was right to block the Senate’s attempt to censor the internet.”

The Endangered Species Act hinders the building of housing.

Jonathan Allen tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

I am sorry to learn that North Carolina-based women’s budget fashion retailer Cato Fashions is closing 120 stores because of tariffs, rising fuel prices, and weakening family budgets.

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… is from page 258 of F.C. Benham’s 1932 paper “The Balance of Trade,” which is Chapter XVIII of the 1932 report of a commission in the U.K., chaired by Sir William Beveridge; the title of the collection is Tariffs: The Case Examined:

A tariff does not leave consumers free to select which imports they can best do without. It makes the selection for them, or, at least, strongly influences their choice. This may be thought wise. We think it a loss. Nor is a tariff as flexible an instrument as a free exchange-rate. It creates vested interests and can only be readily altered in an upward direction. Further, by reducing imports it tends to make the rate of exchange higher than it would otherwise be. This places export industries at a disadvantage, even if wages and other internal costs do not rise.

DBx: Yes.
…..

I can find no link to a copy of this book. The hard copy that I own, and from which the above quotation is taken, was given to me as a gift by the generous Doug Irwin.

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Here’s a letter to National Review Online.

Editor:

Michael Brendan Dougherty completely misses the point of Dan Foster’s excellent response to J.D. Vance’s express desire to “undo” 40 years of globalization (“Undoubtedly 6.8 Percent Is Less than 70 Percent,” October 2). Contrary to Mr. Dougherty’s portrayal, Mr. Foster’s argument is not that the many improvements in America’s economy over the past four decades are due overwhelmingly to globalization, with little to no role played by domestic factors. Instead, as is clear from reading Mr. Foster’s post, he’s challenging Vance’s premise about the condition of America’s economy today compared to its condition in the mid-1980s.

Mr. Dougherty treats Vance’s premise as being this: such a small share of America’s enormous economic improvement over the past 40 years is due to globalization that we can afford to “undo” globalization. But Mr. Dougherty is mistaken. Vance’s actual premise is that there has been no such improvement over the past 40 years in America’s economy. It is that this economy has been so severely damaged over the past 40 years that we must “undo” the economic policies, including globalization, that Vance alleges caused this supposed calamity.

Yet as the facts mustered by Mr. Foster make clear, America’s economy – including the lot of ordinary Americans – has dramatically improved since the mid-1980s. He thus disproves Vance’s premise that the economic liberalization of the past 40 years has failed ordinary Americans.

By the way, I, too, offered evidence against Vance’s clueless premise about the condition of the U.S. economy. And here are yet other bits of evidence against Vance’s ignorant belief:

– America today has 93% more industrial capacity than it had in 1985 (even though U.S. population today is only 44% larger).

– The real value of America’s capital stock was, as of 2023 (the latest year for which I have data), 138% larger than it was in 1985.

– U.S. industrial output is today 85% higher than it was in 1985.

– Americans’ exports of goods and services are nearly 600% greater, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than were Americans’ exports in 1985.

Lusting for greater power, both the MAGA right and the ‘progressive’ left continually insist that the failure of government over the past 40 or so years to further squelch free markets has inflicted deep and unambiguous damage on America’s economy. That’s Vance’s message. It is utterly without foundation.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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America’s founding generation was remarkable, but also human. David Henderson reflects on the great John Adams.

My former Mercatus Center colleague Patrick McLaughlin, now at the Hoover Institution, has this excellent letter in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Jamie Dimon identifies a promising route to his 3% growth goal before turning to foreign economic policy: removing domestic regulatory obstacles (“A Plan for the Western World’s Revival,” op-ed, Sept. 29). That opportunity deserves more than a passing mention.

In research published in the Review of Economic Dynamics, Bentley Coffey, Pietro Peretto and I showed that federal regulatory accumulation reduced U.S. economic growth by approximately 0.8 percentage point per year between 1980 and 2012. The buildup of regulatory requirements distorts investment decisions, which ultimately weakens the business-led innovation that makes workers more productive.

There is also evidence that reversing the accumulation can help. For example, the Canadian province of British Columbia reduced its regulatory requirements by roughly 36% after launching reforms in 2001. Research I conducted with Mr. Coffey estimated that those reductions increased annual economic growth by about one percentage point.

While those estimates don’t guarantee an identical result if the U.S. cuts regulations by 36%, they do make a strong case for the regulatory budgeting approach that British Columbia pioneered.

The approach involves three initial steps and then a feedback loop. First, inventory existing requirements, set reduction targets and require agencies to identify rules whose costs exceed their benefits. Then continually measure success against economic performance and the health, safety and environmental outcomes regulation is supposed to improve.

Mr. Dimon is right to seek faster growth. A serious effort to clear away obsolete and counterproductive rules should be central to that agenda.

The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board explains what shouldn’t – but, sadly, what nevertheless does again – need explaining: price ceilings create shortages and raise the costs that ordinary people incur to acquire price-ceilinged goods and services. Two slices:

In May, Kyrgyzstan imposed price controls on fuel. Gas stations reported shortages. The government repealed the price cap on gasoline in July.

In Bangladesh earlier this year, some drivers waited in line up to 14 hours for price-controlled fuel. As soon as the government allowed prices to rise, the lines in Dhaka, the crowded capital, shortened by two-thirds. Lines elsewhere disappeared entirely.

TotalEnergies, the French oil giant, announced it would voluntarily cap fuel prices at its gas stations in March. In early April, the great majority of gas stations in France had no shortages. Of the 900 that did, 700 belonged to TotalEnergies.

Also in France, universities in April capped meal prices at one euro for all students. The actual cost averages eight euros. The surge in students using cafeterias now means there is often nowhere to sit, and unions threatened to strike over the big increase in work. Some students have said that the long lines make it impossible to eat between classes.

Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, imposed sweeping rent controls in 2024. What followed was a decline in rental agreements. As of March, the supply of rental housing had declined by 23 percent.

…..

Price controls are still doing what they always do: destroy investment, encourage lawbreaking and cause shortages. Politicians would be wise to remember that voters’ opinions might change, but the laws of economics don’t.

Daniel Foster adds his voice to those rightly criticizing J.D. Vance’s wish to “undo” 40 years of globalization. A slice:

A 2024 WTO study suggests that reductions in trade costs between 1995 and 2020 increased global real GDP by about 6.8 percent. For low-income economies, the increase was much larger, about 33 percent.  As for the U.S. in particular, one estimate concludes that international trade alone led to “an increase of $7,014 in [inflation-adjusted] GDP per capita and $18,131 in GDP per household” in the United States between 1950 and 2016. A census report concludes that lower import prices under globalization held inflation down for all American groups between 1995 and 2018, relative to autarky. (The benefits were most pronounced for rural Americans, which will be relevant when you get to the paragraph after next.)

None of these studies capture the full warp and weft of globalization. They’re mostly focused on trade barriers, with some comparative advantage and diffusion of technology and ideas thrown in. But left out are the beneficial effects of foreign direct investment, labor and capital mobility, factor price convergence, multinational production chains, financial integration, and so forth, which are also well-recognized drivers of growth.

David Sergent tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)

Defining a reduction in trade barriers and the development of technologies (containerization, global aviation) that made international trading easier as “central economic planning” is a bait and switch. No one thinks “central planning” = “globalization.” Nor should they.

Harold Black reflects wisely on Trump’s new steel mill in Iowa. A slice:

Ohio State is playing Iowa today, and the president is busy patting himself on the back – a sport in which he remains undefeated. The occasion: a new $15 billion steel mill, the first in 50 years, coming to Iowa.  Naturally, he credited his 50% tariffs. The project is expected to create 1,750 permanent jobs and support up to 6,000 construction jobs. Trump added that it would also create 2,000 new manufacturing and mining jobs. Over the next decade, it is projected to generate $95 billion for the U.S. economy. He took credit, saying his “powerful 50%” tariffs on steel imports last year meant that “our steel industry is roaring back to life. Everyone’s building their plant here because they don’t want to pay tariffs. It’s really not that complicated.”

Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that. The president is a short-timer. If the next president lowers or scraps the tariffs, will the math on a $15 billion plant still work, or does Iowa end up with one of the world’s most expensive machine sheds?  Although not as apparent as beef or energy, Trump’s tariffs have made Americans to pay more for steel than any other country in the world. And while the president bragged that the steel will be “mined, melted, and made completely in the U.S.,” calling it “something very unusual,” he skipped a small detail: the mine’s owner is Mesabi Metallics, a Minnesota-based company owned by India’s Essar Group. Made in America, owned by India – which, to be fair, is “something very unusual.” The plant will be fed by a newly developed $2.5 billion iron ore mine that Mesabi opened on September 17 on Minnesota’s Mesabi Iron Range. And the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) will provide up to $10 billion in financing for the new Iowa steel mill. Hold that thought. Also keep in mind (mine?) that the US steel industry is being dominated by foreigners – US Steel is a wholly owned subsidiary of Nippon Steel. I thought Trump’s policy was America First?

But what is the Export-Import Bank and why is it providing financing for an Indian company? This is from its website: “The EXIM Bank is the official export credit agency of the United States. Our mission is to support American job creation, prosperity and security through exporting. We accomplish this by unlocking financing solutions for U.S. companies competing around the globe. We help level the playing field and fill gaps in private sector financing.” https://www.exim.gov

So let me get this straight: a U.S. government bank is putting up $10 billion of the $15 billion so an Indian corporation can set up shop in Iowa. And once this foreign-owned mill is running, Trump’s 50 percent tariffs will protect it from… foreign competition. Sounds like a sweet deal to me – sweet as Iowa corn. And timing, of course, is everything. The announcement comes just before the midterms. Between the tariffs and the price of fertilizer and diesel, Iowa is suddenly in play. The governorship, a U.S. Senate seat, two of the four congressional districts, and the attorney general’s office are all suddenly competitive in races where the republicans should have been favored. Surely that had nothing to do with the announcement. Right?

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… is from page 306 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s 1962 essay “Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy,” which is an appendix to Buchanan’s and Gordon Tullock’s seminal 1962 book, The Calculus of Consent; the page number here is from Liberty Fund’s 1999 edition of Calculus:

Indeed the only purpose of science is its ultimate assistance in the development of normative propositions. We seek to learn how the world works in order to make it work “better,” to “improve” things: this is as true for physical science as it is for social science.

DBx: Jim Buchanan was born on this date – October 3rd – in 1919.

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Mr. Vance:

Yesterday, you boasted to Jack Posobiec that the Trump administration is “trying to undo 40 years of bad policy, of globalization, of shipping American jobs overseas.”

How curious. Please tell me which of the following results of the “bad policy” and globalization over the past 40 years do you wish to undo?

Unemployment rate
1985: 7.2%                        2025: 4.3%

Total nonfarm employment
1985: 97.53M                  2025: 158.43M

Real avg. hourly wage of production and nonsupervisory workers (2025$)*
1985: $22.10                    2025: $31.34

Real per-capita GDP (2017$)
1985: $35,793                 2025: $70,020

Real median household income (2025$)
1985: $63,090               2025: $87,460

Real median household wealth (2022$)**
1983: $87,859               2022: $192,700

Percentage of manufacturing workers laid-off
1985: 19%                        2025: 11%

Median sq. footage of newly built single-family homes
1985: 1,620 sq. ft.          2025: 2,142 sq. ft.

Life expectancy at birth
1985: 74.6 years            2025: 79.4 years

Perhaps you have other evidence that justifies your insinuation that, over the past four decades, Americans have been – to use a favorite expression of your boss – “ripped off.” If so, please do share that evidence with the American people. A man with your intellect surely doesn’t want to make bold claims that are unsubstantiated by the facts.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* 1985 dollars converted into 2025 dollars using the personal-consumption-expenditure index.

** Calculations performed by economist Jeremy Horpedahl and shared with Bryan Caplan and me, to appear in Bryan’s and my forthcoming book, Blockade (Cato Institute, 2027).

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Mike Munger describes the American way of zoning.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board is right that Trump’s (relatively) government-hands-off approach to AI is commendable. A slice:

Companies also have strong business incentives to pace and police themselves to avoid costly lawsuits and government enforcement actions. “I have a guardrail. You know what the guardrail is? The Department of Justice,” Mr. Trump said this week.

He’s right that new laws aren’t needed to punish wrongdoing or negligence. Companies know the government sword is hanging over them. To reinforce the point, Federal Trade Commission officials this week let it be known they have opened a probe of frontier AI models.

Democrats nonetheless want to put the federal government in charge of AI. That’s the real reason Senate Democrats on Wednesday blocked the Ratepayer Protection Act, which the House passed last month on an overwhelming bipartisan 417-3 vote.

The bill would require state public utility commissions to consider adopting a federal standard under which large data centers pay the incremental costs of new grid infrastructure to support their power loads. In our view, the legislation is unnecessary since most states are already doing this. AI companies are building their own power generation and paying for grid upgrades to connect data centers.

Yet Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer objected to the bill because it isn’t binding. “Senate Democrats want to make it mandatory for data centers to cover their own costs, by law, not by suggestion or hope or whim,” he said. No—they want to block data centers to put AI development under political control.

See Bernie Sanders’s bill, which would pause data-center construction until the government ensures they don’t “exacerbate the threat of climate change” and their models “do not threaten the health and well-being of working families, privacy and civil rights, and the future of humanity” or cause “job displacement.”

His legislation reflects the growing Democratic consensus. Had Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, it’s likely the federal government would have used its power to impose a de facto AI moratorium. When it comes to AI, Mr. Trump has superior intelligence.

Jason Sorens explains that “public sector unions undermine accountability.”

GMU Econ alums Caleb Fuller and Scott Burns keep the case for free trade simple (yet strong). A slice:

First, people reverse the logic of bargaining when they begin thinking of “nations,” instead of “individuals.” In our everyday exchanges, we all want to get as much as we can with the least sacrifice. Some might even call this “the art of the deal!” But in international trade, people’s rhetoric shifts, as if the objective were to “give, and not to get” — to produce and export (give) as much as we can while importing (get) as little as possible. That anti-import sentiment is the essence of mercantilism, the very doctrine Adam Smith set out to dismantle 250 years ago when he penned The Wealth of Nations.

If you slip into this first fallacy, you’ll inevitably fall into a second: treating cheap imports as bad news. In everyday life, it seems obvious that we are better off if we can sell our exports for very high prices and buy our imports at very low prices. We want to sell our output for a high price, and we hope to find “Always Low Prices” when we stroll through the sliding doors at Walmart. Protectionism teaches us to lament in foreign trade what we celebrate at our local checkout counter: low prices. American consumers rarely complain when domestic companies offer Black Friday or Cyber Monday discounts. So why should they object when foreign governments do the same?

It follows from this second point that foreign subsidies are not inherently injurious to us. For a government to subsidize, it must first tax. Suppose a foreign power taxes its own people, then subsidizes some domestic industry that, in turn, sells us cheaper goods. In effect, these foreign governments are taxing their citizens to sell cheaper goods to ours.

Justin Stapley makes the case that constitutionalism helped to fuel free markets.

Todd Zywicki, a GMU colleague over in the Scalia School of Law, warns that “Democrats are trying to politicize a process that has been apolitical: supervisory oversight of bank holding companies.” Here’s his conclusion:

Now is the time for the Fed to exercise the independence that the Supreme Court affirmed this summer by articulating clear, consistent standards for bringing innovative financial products under federal regulatory scrutiny. Otherwise, the success of this political pressure campaign will embolden activists to scuttle efforts to bring other innovative entities and products such as crypto issuers and payment processors within the regulatory perimeter. Several applications from a variety of nontraditional entities are currently pending with both the Fed and the Office of the Comptroller of Currency. If Messrs. Warsh and Gould don’t stand up for their agencies’ apolitical rule of law, it will rapidly erode.

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… is from page 87 of Samuel Gregg’s forthcoming book, The Civilization of Commerce:

The focus of commercial civilization is on the long term rather than on the immediate. Commercial society makes no promise of immediate well-being to anyone. Its operating claim is that by allowing many invisible hands to work unimpeded by excessive regulation and intervention, the result will be incremental, steady, and generally lasting improvements that slowly but surely increase people’s well-being in economic terms and continually release the energies of which Hume spoke into other sectors of society.

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Richard Stern writes wisely about AI. Two slices:

There is an intelligence loose in the world that has no respect for humanity. It seeks to manipulate us, pit us against one another, and harness us to its own purposes, and it is certain it can run your life better than you can.

It’s not what you’re thinking: The intelligence is that of every socialist and collectivist who has ever lived, from Karl Marx to Bernie Sanders. Whether or not misaligned artificial intelligence truly poses a threat, misaligned human intelligence, seeking to concentrate unlimited power in the hands of government bureaucrats, remains the greatest threat we face.

…..

Government-enforced monopolies don’t just threaten liberty; they stifle innovation. When AI leaders beg the government to regulate away competition, it’s the oldest trick in the book, and we shouldn’t be fooled by it. The central holding of technological power — in this case, of AI — is never a good solution. Perhaps these tech leaders and politicians fear AI will replace exactly one job: their own, as self-anointed high priests of central planning and moral arbiters of society. Many of them have spent decades preaching climate alarmism and a de-growth agenda, while portraying humanity as a parasite feeding off the Earth.

Are these the people you want to speak for all of us and control our future? If the world’s most gifted mathematicians and programmers couldn’t build a perfect AI sandbox, do you think the regulators who gave us Covid lockdowns and cars that shut off at red lights will do better?

Meanwhile, the private sector is already harnessing AI to solve our greatest problems. Hospitals adopting AI have cut mortality rates, and the first AI-designed medicines are already in human trials.

The risk of a rogue AI agent doing serious damage is far higher if we turn over control of the technology to bureaucrats and a few favored business executives. To outsource the right to develop AI is to leave the rest of us beholden to the imperfect foresight and murky motives of the few.

Eric Boehm explains “how regulation, immigration policy, and tariffs made your BLT more expensive.”

Colin Grabow makes clear that “the Jones Act delivers high costs but little maritime security.” A slice:

The national security case for the Jones Act, which restricts domestic waterborne cargo shipments to vessels that are US-flagged, US-built, and US-owned, is fairly straightforward. Theoretically, such measures provide the United States with ships in wartime to transport equipment and supplies for the military, the trained mariners to crew them, and shipyards that can both build new vessels and repair existing ones. The problem is that the law delivers only a fraction of its advertised benefits, at a wildly disproportionate cost.

Start with the fleet. Under decades of Jones Act protection, the number of US-built and US-flagged oceangoing cargo ships has declined from 257 in 1980 to 119 in 2000 to just 92 today. Of those, only 74 are deemed militarily useful, and it’s uncertain how many might actually be available in times of conflict. In 2020, for example, a DoD-directed study warned that accessing a significant portion of the Jones Act tanker fleet could unacceptably disrupt the US economy. A year later, the head of the US Transportation Command testified before Congress that wargaming suggested economic considerations might preclude the military from relying on Jones Act vessels.

Scott Lincicome tweets a Bloomberg headline: “Korea Disputes Trump’s Claim It Agreed to Invest in Alaska LNG.”