There is very little shipping between us ports. Not zero, but not much.

Speculation: this system propped up by the long-distance trucking lobby.

Longshoreman's union "touch fees" reportedly have a lot to do with it:

https://capitalresearch.org/article/what-you-need-to-know-ab...

https://twitter.com/johnkonrad/status/1840904466310316459

" it’s somehow cheaper to truck containers hundreds of miles and let taxpayers foot the road repair bill than let the union touch it two more times for short sea shipping to work."

It's not the Longshoreman's union fault that truck drivers have zero leverage against their employers in comparison.

If every form of transportation had strong unions, the system could find whatever healthy or natural distribution was actually economically efficient. More stuff would be sent by Train and Boat, both substantially more efficient in most cases, and both industries that suffer in the US from being ignored.

Instead, so much of the US essentially just runs on Employee Coercion Arbitrage and we all suffer for it.

We should be able to shop around transportation choices without exploiting underpaid workers.

Realistically, a carbon tax would actually have the same outcome if you hate unions.

The longshoreman's union is acting as a rent-seeking monopolist, which is behavior which is usually frowned upon when the actor isn't a union (and perhaps should be when it is).

> It's not the Longshoreman's union fault that truck drivers have zero leverage against their employers in comparison.

If that shipping method is cheaper than a union charge, then the union charge is too high.

Even though yes truck drivers should be getting paid more.

Like, okay, we could pay truck drivers twice as much and now it's only cheaper to truck the containers around 150 miles or whatever? That's still way too expensive.

And a carbon tax doesn't fix this. It makes trucking more expensive but it doesn't make the charge for using a crane less expensive.

The Jones act goes back to before the existence of long distance trucking, and has so many interested parties just on the maritime side that it will take a shift in world order for it to change.

"Son, custody of the Jones Act has been passed down from technology generation to technology generation..."

I can believe that.

> There is very little shipping between us ports. Not zero, but not much

A one-shot solution to reducing inflation and emissions would be in repealing the Jones Act. (Also, increasing the prevalence of ferry transport.)