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This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 31st, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

While the Jones Act is meant to simply protect some US shippers from competition,

the problems associated with the nearly 100 year old law may have gotten worse.

That's according to Manuel Reyes, CEO of the Puerto Rico Food Marketing Industry and

Distribution Chamber.

We spoke at the Cato Institute's conference on the Jones Act

earlier this month. The Jones Act is about a hundred years old. It governs which ships are allowed to deliver goods sort of along the coasts of the United States.

And you argue, and this was surprising surprising to me that it has gotten worse that is the costs

that the Jones Act imposes on Americans have gotten worse just in the last few decades. Why is that? Well because the Jones Act doesn't

operate in a vacuum. It's part of a larger set of regulations that also deal with competition and market concentration, that sort of thing.

In the markets in the case of offshore domestic trades as Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico tend to be and have always tended to be concentrated.

So you had a structure, regulation structure that kind of avoided and protected shippers and consumers.

And throughout, specifically 1995, as part of all the deregulation process of transport that was going about in the US.

That level of supervision and oversight

was eliminated under the premise that the market

...