History, National Security, and Why the Critics Are Wrong
I have spent my entire legal career in and around the Jones Act. I have fought for the men and women it protects. I have read the legislative history that explains why it exists. And I have watched, with a mix of frustration and bemusement, as a parade of think tanks, free-market advocates, and editorial boards have taken turns calling for its repeal.
These critics are not stupid people. But on this issue, they are profoundly, dangerously wrong. And the nature of their error is worth examining carefully, because it reveals something important about what happens when economic models are applied to national security problems without the wisdom to know where the model breaks down.
Let me tell you what the Jones Act actually is, where it came from, why it exists, and why repealing it would be one of the most strategically reckless things the United States could do.
What the Jones Act Actually Says
The Jones Act — formally, the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 — is a federal statute that imposes a requirement most Americans have never heard of: goods transported by water between two points in the United States must be carried on ships that are United States-built, United States-owned, United States-flagged, and crewed by United States citizens or permanent residents.
That is the cabotage provision — the one the critics love to attack. But the Jones Act is also, and equally importantly, a piece of labor legislation. It gives seamen who are injured in the course of their employment on vessels in navigable waters a right of action against their employers for negligence — a right that exists outside and above the workers’ compensation system that covers most American workers on land. The Jones Act seaman’s right to sue in negligence, the doctrine of unseaworthiness, and the doctrine of maintenance and cure are among the most important worker protections in American law. They exist because Congress understood something fundamental: the men and women who work on vessels at sea are not like other workers. They cannot walk off the job. They cannot call an ambulance. They cannot sue in the state court down the road. They are alone on the water, dependent entirely on the decisions their employers make about safety, equipment, and training.
The Jones Act puts the cost of those decisions where it belongs: on the employer.
The History: Why It Was Created and Who Created It
To understand the Jones Act, you have to understand the world that Senator Wesley Livsey Jones of Washington State was looking at in 1920.
America had just emerged from the First World War. The war had demonstrated, with brutal clarity, the strategic importance of a domestic merchant marine. When the United States entered the war, the country did not have enough American ships to move the men and materiel the war required. We were dependent on foreign vessels. That dependence was not merely inconvenient — it was dangerous. Ships flying foreign flags, operated by foreign crews, with foreign loyalties, were not reliably available for American military logistics in a war that was fundamentally a contest of logistics.
Senator Jones and his colleagues understood something that seems obvious in retrospect but was contested in his day: national security and commercial convenience are not the same thing, and when they conflict, national security must win. The free market, left to its own devices, will always choose the cheaper option. If Filipino-built, Liberian-flagged, Chinese-crewed vessels can carry cargo from Houston to New Orleans for less money than American vessels, the free market will use those ships. In peacetime, that is fine. The cargo moves, the prices are lower, the accountants are happy.
The problem comes in wartime. Or in a pandemic. Or in a natural disaster. Or in any of the scenarios where the United States suddenly needs to move things by water and the ships it needs to move them have disappeared — because they are flagged in countries that are not our allies, crewed by people who have no obligation to serve American interests, and built in shipyards that have no interest in American economic or military capability.
Senator Jones and the generation that created the Merchant Marine Act were not protectionists in the pejorative sense. They were strategists — thinking about the world at the level of civilizational competition, not quarterly earnings. They were far smarter about this than most of the people currently calling for repeal.
The same generation that created the Jones Act also built the foundations of American national security infrastructure. These were not free-market solutions. They were deliberate, government-managed investments in national resilience — investments that paid off when the United States needed them most. The Jones Act was in that same tradition.
World War II and the Merchant Marine: The Case for the Record
If you want to understand why the Jones Act matters, read about the American Merchant Marine in World War II.
The Merchant Marine lost more men per capita in World War II than any branch of the United States military. Merchant seamen sailed unarmed cargo ships through submarine-infested waters, often without escort, carrying the fuel and food and ammunition that kept the Allied war effort alive. When a torpedo hit, there was no organized rescue. Men burned to death in oil fires on the surface of the Atlantic. They froze to death in the North Sea. They drowned in the Pacific.
They did it because the cargo had to move.
The United States was able to wage a two-ocean war against the most powerful military forces the world had ever assembled partly because we had the industrial capacity to build ships faster than the Germans could sink them. The Liberty Ship program — which produced over 2,700 vessels during the war — was possible only because the United States had the shipyards, the workers, the engineers, and the institutional knowledge to execute it. That infrastructure existed, in part, because the Jones Act had maintained a domestic shipbuilding and maritime industry during the lean interwar years.
Without the Jones Act, that infrastructure would have been hollowed out by foreign competition in the 1920s and 1930s, just as American steel and textile manufacturing were hollowed out decades later. And without that infrastructure, the math of the war changes. Probably not in America’s favor.
The Critics’ Argument — And Why It Is Shortsighted
The critics — and the Cato Institute is perhaps the most persistent among them — make an argument that has the surface plausibility of all arguments from economic efficiency. The Jones Act raises shipping costs between American ports. It requires American shippers to use more expensive American vessels when foreign vessels would be cheaper. Those higher costs are passed on to consumers, particularly in places like Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Guam, which are heavily dependent on waterborne commerce with the mainland.
On the narrow economic merits, within the four corners of a cost-benefit analysis that ignores national security, this argument is correct. Jones Act shipping does cost more than foreign alternatives would. That is not in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether that cost analysis is the right analysis.
Let me make the point with an analogy. The United States military is extraordinarily expensive. We spend more on national defense than the next ten countries combined. If you ran a pure cost-benefit analysis on the Pentagon in peacetime — running every function through a market efficiency screen — you would conclude that we are wildly overpaying for services we only occasionally need. The efficient solution would be to cut the military to a fraction of its current size, save trillions, and hire mercenaries when we need military capability.
Only a fool would propose that policy. Everyone understands, intuitively, that you cannot build military readiness in a crisis. You have to maintain it continuously, in peacetime, at a cost that is higher than you would pay if you were only buying military services on the spot market. The readiness itself has value — enormous value — that does not show up in any quarterly accounting.
The Jones Act argument is identical. The American domestic merchant marine and domestic shipbuilding capacity are strategic assets that cannot be conjured in a crisis. If the United States were to face a major conflict — with China in the Pacific, with Russia in the Atlantic, in any of the scenarios that serious defense planners spend their careers on — the ability to move American goods, American military equipment, and American troops on American ships crewed by American sailors would be indispensable. That capability cannot be recreated on short notice. It must be maintained.
The Cato Institute is asking the wrong question. The question is not “how much does the Jones Act cost in peacetime?” The question is “what does it cost to not have a domestic merchant fleet when you desperately need one?” That cost is incalculable — because you pay it in lives, not dollars.
The critics also consistently understate the scale of what the Jones Act supports. The domestic maritime industry employs over 650,000 Americans directly and indirectly. It contributes tens of billions of dollars annually to the American economy. It includes not just the vessels themselves but the shipyards, the equipment manufacturers, the maritime academies, the unions, and the entire ecosystem of businesses and institutions that support them. Repeal the Jones Act, and all of that hollows out within a decade — exactly as our steel industry hollowed out, exactly as our electronics manufacturing hollowed out, exactly as every other industry hollowed out when it was exposed to unrestricted foreign competition without any consideration of the strategic consequences.
The Jones Act, National Security, and the China Question
The national security argument for the Jones Act has never been more relevant than it is today.
China has the largest shipbuilding capacity in the world — by a significant margin. Chinese shipyards produce more tonnage annually than the rest of the world combined. China’s strategic vision explicitly integrates commercial maritime capability with military power projection. China has built the world’s largest navy, the world’s largest coast guard, and dominates global commercial shipbuilding in a way that gives it enormous leverage over the maritime infrastructure on which the entire world economy depends.
Meanwhile, the United States Merchant Marine has been in relative decline for decades. We have fewer American-flagged deep-sea cargo vessels than at any point since before World War II. The ships we have are aging. The maritime academies are underfunded. The pool of trained American mariners is smaller than strategic planners would like.
In this environment, the Jones Act is not just a labor protection statute or a shipping regulation. It is one of the few remaining policy instruments that maintains any semblance of American domestic maritime industrial capacity. Weakening it further — let alone repealing it — would be a gift to every nation that benefits from American strategic vulnerability on the seas.
The Trump administration understands this. Trump has been consistently supportive of the Jones Act and the American maritime industry, recognizing that you cannot have an America-first policy on trade and national defense while simultaneously allowing foreign vessels to compete freely in American coastal waters. The political coalition behind the Jones Act — American maritime workers, domestic shipbuilders, American-flag shipping companies, the major maritime unions, and the national security community — is broad and bipartisan precisely because the underlying logic is sound.
The Jones Act’s Protection of American Seamen
I want to return to the part of the Jones Act that does not get enough attention in the public debate: the protection it provides to the men and women who work on vessels.
I have spent my career representing injured mariners. I have represented offshore oil workers, tanker crews, container ship deckhands, supply boat captains, and fishing boat crew members. I have seen what happens when a maritime employer cuts corners on safety — when they defer maintenance on equipment, when they run short-handed crews to save money on payroll, when they choose speed over caution in bad weather, when they fail to provide adequate training for dangerous operations.
I have also seen what happens to the people who get hurt when those decisions go wrong. They are offshore, far from adequate medical care. By the time they reach a hospital, injuries that could have been managed are catastrophic. Careers are ended. Families are broken. And the companies responsible — the ones that made the decision to cut the corner — are standing behind their lawyers arguing that the injured worker assumed the risk, or that they are only entitled to the meager benefits of a workers’ compensation system designed for land-based workers with access to standard medical care.
The Jones Act cuts through that. It gives the injured seaman a right to sue in negligence. It gives them maintenance and cure — the right to have basic living expenses and medical bills paid during recovery, regardless of fault. It gives them the right to pursue unseaworthiness claims against the vessel owner when the vessel itself is inadequate or unsafe. These are not bureaucratic technicalities. They are the legal architecture that stands between maritime workers and the economic devastation that a serious injury at sea would otherwise produce.
The critics who call for Jones Act repeal are, in most cases, focused entirely on the cabotage provisions — the shipping cost question. But you cannot surgically remove the labor protection provisions without affecting the broader framework. The two are intertwined. Weaken one, and you weaken both.
Conclusion: The Wisdom of the Founders of the Jones Act
I am a lawyer, not a historian or a defense policy analyst. But I have spent enough time in the trenches of maritime law to have developed a deep respect for the people who built the legal framework that governs the sea.
The men who created the Jones Act were not naive protectionists. They were serious people thinking about serious problems. They understood that the sea is both an opportunity and a vulnerability for the United States. They understood that commercial advantage and strategic readiness are not always the same thing. They understood that the short-term efficiency gains from opening American coastal waters to foreign competition would be purchased at the price of long-term strategic capacity.
A hundred years of history has validated their judgment. Two world wars, a Cold War, and a growing strategic competition with China have all confirmed, over and over again, that a nation that cannot project power on the sea cannot defend its interests. And a nation that cannot move its own goods on its own ships is not, in any meaningful sense, self-sufficient.
So when the libertarian think tanks call the Jones Act an anachronism, I want to ask a simple question: what is your plan? What is the plan when the next war comes, and the United States needs to move a million tons of cargo from Houston to Honolulu and there are no American ships to do it? What is the plan when the next global supply chain crisis hits, and the foreign-flagged vessels that carry our goods are suddenly unavailable because their flag states have interests that are not ours?
The men who created the Jones Act had a plan. It was called the American Merchant Marine. It has protected American workers, supported American shipbuilding, and contributed to American national security for over a century. It deserves better than to be dismissed by people who have never set foot on a vessel in navigable waters and whose models assume that national security is just another line item in a cost-benefit analysis.
The Jones Act is not perfect. No century-old statute is. There are legitimate debates about its application in specific contexts, about how to modernize its provisions, about how to ensure it serves its purposes efficiently in a changed world. Those debates are worth having. But the core of the Act — the commitment to American-crewed, American-flagged vessels in American waters, and the protection of the workers who man them — is not a relic of the past. It is a foundation for the future.
Leave it alone.
Brian Beckcom studied admiralty law at the University of Texas School of Law under Professor David W. Robertson.