GMU Econ alum Caleb Petitt deconstructs ships. A slice:
Although Americans have to pay more for ships and shipping, proponents of the Jones Act often justify it as necessary for national security. Importing foreign ships, they argue, could make the United States reliant on foreign shipbuilders and unprepared for disasters and wars. If the United States were to get involved in a war and were cut off from foreign shipbuilders, America would have no shipbuilding industry to fall back on. Essentially, the Jones Act aims to insulate America from reliance on foreign markets.
But this rests on an illusion. The supply chain for domestically built ships extends well outside the U.S. market. This means that the United States is still reliant on foreign markets for producing ships. Americans pay higher shipping costs without gaining the purported benefits of insulation from foreign markets. In reality, Jones Act ships are not U.S.-built; they are U.S.-assembled.
The dataset below substantiates the claim that America relies on foreign producers for components used in the construction of commercial ships. As of April 2025, no Jones Act ship with an American-made engine has been built since 2000, nor one with an American propeller since 2010, nor one with an American anchor since 1998, and there are no ships in the Jones Act fleet with American-built generators. Given this evidence, it is safe to say that modern Jones Act ships rely on components produced abroad, and that the Jones Act has not removed American shipbuilders’ reliance on foreign manufacturers.
This national political economy is not socialist or egalitarian but also not a free market. The best label for it is national collectivism or neo-mercantilism. This means support for protectionism and for a national industrial policy in which governments direct investment. It also means opposition to the trade agreements—regulatory harmonization deals that took a great deal of regulatory discretion away from national governments—that were popular after 1990, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. There is a particular emphasis on manufacturing and farming, as opposed to globally traded services. There is skepticism or outright hostility toward finance.
Two things should be noted here. Firstly, this vision is not compatible with the form capitalism has taken since the 1970s and the kind of international rule-governed order created since then. Nor is it compatible with the classical liberal ideal of a global market and trading system in which individuals and companies trade with each other in a way that makes national borders as irrelevant as possible. Both of those require global rules, however generated, and a removal of economic decisions from national governments in the case of actually existing global capitalism, and from politics altogether in the second case.
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In the New Right version of identity politics, there are “real” or “natural” identities that are derived from things that cannot be chosen. These include such things as the place of one’s birth, the parents and siblings you have, the people you grow up among, the language you speak, in many places your religion, but also your genetic inheritance, your physical sex, your biological nature as an embodied being. This is a prescriptive and determined identity, not a chosen one.
Related to this but distinct is a concern for the household and a feeling that current policy, cultural forms, and economic life all work to undermine it. The family is important in the nationalist right because it is the main channel by which the ideas, beliefs, practices, and narratives of national identity are passed on. One feature of this is a valorization of traditional gender roles. Another is a concern about the birth rate and support for pronatalist policies.
Republicans must choose. They cannot implement endless tax cuts, raise defense spending by 42 percent, and also refuse to reform Social Security and Medicare. Something has to give. Cutting foreign aid, trimming waste, or reducing immigration-related expenses won’t begin to close the gap in any meaningful way.
Democrats face the same reckoning. They cannot be the party of expanded entitlements, climate spending coupled with degrowth demands, student debt relief, and the preservation of every program without pushing America further toward a fiscal disaster. Increasing taxes on the wealthy is not a fiscal plan. The arithmetic does not come close to closing a gap of this magnitude even under the most optimistic assumptions.
Paul Mueller talks with GMU Econ’s emeritus Nobel laureate Vernon Smith.
GMU Econ alum Michael Peterson explains “why Keynes would have reared AI — and why we shouldn’t.”
Also writing insightfully about AI is my GMU Econ colleague Alex Tabarrok:
Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.
So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It’s not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example.
Nor is this argument purely theoretical. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact in 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working — people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds and the amount of leisure, including retirement has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There’s no reason we cannot do it again.
National Review‘s Jim Geraghty isn’t impressed with the economy so far of Trump 2.0.
