Probably the biggest safety improvement for the dry bulk sector in recent years has been Indonesia's protectionist ban on nickel ore exports.

> death traps for employees

This is really sad. Millions of dollars worth of cargo, and yet they put the lives of the sailors at such risk.

The profit margins for a single transit is quite small. There might be $100 million in cargo, but the shipping company might only get $40K for transporting it.

The other issue with port regulations is that they aren't really enforced except to provide an (bribery) income for the port master.

I've heard a number of stories of some ports that effectively require bribery to get your ship cleared. If the ship captain elects for the actual inspection instead, the port master will intentionally delay the ship for weeks.

Iirc Argentina is the required bribery country to the point of companies planning for it.

Care to guess what the minimum wage per month is for seafarers?

https://www.ics-shipping.org/current-issue/ilo-minimum-wage-...

Well, it's mostly regulation that sets the incentives to transform them into deathtraps, not deregulation.

The regulations I am talking about are immigration restrictions. If people from poorer countries could migrate freely to more productive countries, they could be more picky about which jobs to accept.

And unlike any particular (safety) regulation that can be gamed easily, it's much harder to game your employees' demands when they have good outside options.

This is of course the classic libertarian default counter argument. Zoom out enough and reduce government until the situation is shaken up so that the original discussed problem can be arguably speculated to be less relevant in the brave new world. Abracadara, the original problem was too much government.

Yes. There's a lot of this on HN it seems. Of course the argument doesn't hold up to evidence... Places like Somalia, Haiti, Yemen, etc. are great concrete case studies to understand what really happens in places with minimal or non-existent governments. The evidence doesn't exactly point towards major advancement in workers' causes.

It used to be called Startup News.

Given those pro-capitalist beginnings, the site has drifted relentlessly leftwards over time.

Oh no, you’re straw man of libertarian ideals has proven easy to defeat!

Libertarians don’t want non-existent governments as the highest priority. The key priority is using markets to determine prices and a critical part of that is being able to enforce property rights. A big government focused on enforcing those rights is completely supported by libertarians.

Well sure but that's not an argument in favor of libertarianism as an answer to the dangerous working conditions for ship crew either. A government that is focused on property rights, just like the flags of convenience under which most maritime shipping takes place, doesn't care much about labor regulations or immigration in the first place. In a way, international waters are already the "libertarian state".

In some sense, yes. See https://www.econlib.org/archives/2005/07/the_economics_a.htm... and https://www.econlib.org/archives/2017/05/cruise_ships_an.htm...

I was suggesting that if you want to help workers, you need to give them access to better outside options.