![]() ![]() The goal of this post is to explain what the hell is going on here and defend those three claims. Given how much it could do for our ports and thus our economy, as well as the reclamation projects we could do, repeal seems pretty damn important. The actions that could repeal the act mostly involve a relatively small amount of standard-issue lobbying effort – so it’s tractable. An illustration of this is that my exploration of this led to it having a Wikipedia page. There’s a bunch of talk recently about the Dredge Act which is how I noticed it, but that’s different from the actions that actually lead to repeal – it’s still neglected. I claim that, EA style, this is highly (1) important, (2) tractable and (3) neglected. (This isn’t about shipping – that’s the Jones Act, which has similar ownership rules for shipping within the US, and which we’ll get to later.) ![]() It says, to paraphrase, no underwater digging – to repair ports, or build bigger ones, or fix waterways – unless the boat doing the digging was built in the US, and is owned and operated by Americans. We must repeal the Foreign Dredge Act of 1906. Yet if I had to pick one policy that was the Platonic ideal of stupid, the thing that has almost zero upside and also has the best ratio of ‘amount of damage this is doing to America’ versus ‘reasons why we can’t stop being idiots about this’ there is (so far) a clear winner. My Covid posts have covered quite a lot of them. There are a lot of ludicrously terrible government laws, regulations and policies across all the domains of life.
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