“Forced use of higher-cost U.S.-flag vessels has benefitted domestic water carrier firms, shipbuilding companies, and associated labor at the expense of consumers. This advantage, however, has been diluted because inflated shipping costs has reduced the attractiveness of barge and tanker transport compared to other alternatives.”
The Puerto Rico recovery effort has brought attention to an arcane special-interest cabotage regulation that delayed shipments to the imperiled island–and required a waiver from President Trump: Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, [(Public Law 261, 41 Stat. 988 (1920)], commonly known as the Jones Act.
Previous posts at MasterResource (here and here) examined the history of oil-export regulation by the federal government; this post surveys the history of water-vessel restrictions from Washington, D.C. directly or indirectly impacting oceanic commerce.…
Continue Reading“Classical liberals must expose the quixotic quest to ‘save’ or ‘stabilize’ the climate and must educate the public about what is really involved: a new, powerful government lever on economies and freedom, anywhere and everywhere. Socialist central planning for economies may be intellectually dead, but global climate planning is alive and well.”
“For classical liberalism, privatizing the subsoil to enlarge and democratize wealth from Mexico to Venezuela to Saudi Arabia to Nigeria is the number one energy issue, not climate change. Yet it goes uninvestigated and unmentioned at R Street and the Niskanen Center. It might be CO2-positive, after all, not something the climate funders want to promote.”
The toxic brew of climate alarmism and climate activism (aka forced energy transformation) is incompatible with the theory and practice of classical liberalism.…
Continue Reading“When environmental groups bear the costs of managing their own lands, their behavior is often very different from what they advocate on public lands.”
“As Richard Stroup of PERC once put it: ‘Audubon is smart to maintain wildlife habitat while capitalizing on revenue potential—now if only our federal land management agencies could figure this out.'”
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would seek to open oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The plan, outlined in Trump’s 2018 budget resolution, has reignited a long-standing debate over the oil-rich Alaskan wildlife refuge.
“Some places are so special that they should simply be off-limits,” Nicole Whittington-Evans of the Wilderness Society said at the time, arguing that the refuge is “too wild to drill” and “has values far beyond whatever oil might lie beneath it.”…
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