Let me reply with a solid example: the American Bering Sea fishing industry, and the marine transportation associated with it.
At one time foreign factory ships fished in Alaska up to 12 miles offshore in the lucrative Bering Sea fishing industry. Foreigners caught and processed the fish. They alone had the tech to do this on a massive scale. Moreover, they did so unregulated, fishing whenever they wanted.
Then in the 1980s Alaskan fishermen and fisheries scientists spurred the Federal government to ban foreign fishing within 300 miles of American shores.
The Cato Instituteās thinking would have you believe that this would somehow lead to the loss of American jobs and innovation. In reality, there were few American jobs in the fishery prior to the law, and a few years afterwards there were thousands. We did not have the tech for large scale factory fishing. No problem. We just hired the Norwegians and Japanese to show us how. And the American public did not complain about the cost of seafood. They simply bought more of it.
Hereās the kind of the nuance the absolutist thinkers of the Cato Institute always miss. While the fishing is done by Americans, and the shore plants that process some of the fish are owned by Americans, many of the investors are foreigners. Bering Sea shore plants are often hybrid American /Japanese entities, with some Japanese techs on-site in the factory. The factory trawlers often have Norwegian fishing experts aboard, amidst American officers and crews. Everything is American-owned but some if it is foreign-backed.
All of this is thriving. There are no lack of American living wage jobs. The American public is still eating fillet-o-fish sandwiches. There is an American sector to the trade, and a foreign sector. It is not one or the other. All sorts of nationalities mix on the boats and in the shore plants. All of them thriving because of a Cracker-Jack mix of protectionism and laissez-faire principles. And the fish stocks are absolutely protected against the over-fishing which wiped out the Atlantic Grand Banks. Recall the once immense Canadian cod fishing industry utterly wiped out because the Canadians did not protect their trade.
Now focus on the marine transportation associated with Bering Sea fishing. Four different American shipping companies, as well as a number of foreign shipping companies, service tiny Dutch Harbor, the center of the trade. American vessels carry cargo to the US, and Asia. Foreign companies ship it all around the world. Several years ago a foreign carrier began a complicated dodge to carry Jones Act cargo through a foreign port. This went on for years, siphoning cargo away from American carriers. This hurt my company, which operates freighters. We had just built a new innovative boat to take care of some customers, only to see their cargo siphoned away by foreigners. We lost jobs because of it.
Last year a judge ruled this dodge around the Jones Act was illegal. Jobs flooded back to us, and our American competitors, overnight. We American competitorsāfreighters, tugs, container shipsāstill viciously fight between ourselves over the DH trade. Foreign carriers still operate out of DH. All that has happened is that a ratio of American jobs has been carved out for American mariners, as was done for American fishermen.
So Iāve seen over my lifetime how the right mix of protectionism and laissez-faire principles preserves American jobs, fosters commerce, and preserves natural resources. And it exposes to me how backwards in thinking the Cato Institute really is.
