This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 23rd, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Jones Act has been on the books for more than a hundred years and in that time it's made it harder to ship goods,

raised the prices on all manner of things, including shipping

itself, and put American producers and consumers at disadvantages.

The Cato Institute has published a new book detailing the costs of this largely unexamined law, the case against the Jones Act.

Its editors are Cato's Colin Grabo and Enemonic.

How long have we had what is known as the Jones Act?

Well, the Jones Act has been in place since June 5, 1920.

So we reached the 100 year mark last month, but laws very similar to the Jones Act have been in place since 1789, basically since beginning of this country.

So while the Jones Act is, um, this is commonly viewed as being a hundred years old you can properly I think

view it as as being far older than that and dating back to the founding of this country.

So the way I look at it, you know, this is not just a hundred year old law,

this is a law that is far more outdated and archaic even than what many people commonly suspect.

And you know, why was this, why was this adopted?

You know, if we had similar laws on the books before 1920, why was this law passed?

Well, it's a really interesting story about some local protectionism in the Seattle area,

where Senator Wesley Jones of Washington decided that he needed to increase

competition of the shipbuilding industry that was his hope anyways by cutting out

the railroad industry.

And so his entire idea behind this was to help the protection of shipping interest

cut out what was happening in terms of shipping being routed through Canada and to cut out that route for them

completely so that the US shippers would actually have the advantage of basically carrying US cargo.

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