Earlier this week, the Cato Institute’s Jones Act Waiver Tracker recorded its 300th completed voyage since the waiver was issued on March 17 for the transportation of energy and fertilizer products. Those voyages carried over 80 million barrels without idling a single Jones Act tanker, providing some indication of how much domestic commerce the Jones Act has constrained.

Freed from the law’s prohibition on using foreign-built and foreign-flagged ships, tankers operating under the waiver have, on numerous domestic routes, delivered more energy cargoes in months than Jones Act vessels have in years. The following figures and charts illustrate the scale of this commerce and hint at what lasting access to foreign shipping could make possible.

Economists at the New York Fed have published a new paper on how the 2025 tariffs reached consumer prices, and it has drawn deserved attention. In the paper, Mary Amiti, Sebastian Heise, and David Weinstein trace tariffs from the border to the store shelf. That is no small task, as consumer price categories mix imported and domestic goods and don’t line up with tariff schedules.

Some of the findings confirm their earlier work: Foreign exporters absorbed little of the tariffs, and roughly 90 percent landed on US import prices. The bigger contribution is showing that tariffs also raised the prices of goods made in America. Domestic producers paid more for imported inputs, and some raised their markups as competing imports became more expensive. 

All told, the authors estimate that about a quarter of the tariff increase shows up in consumer goods, with roughly a third of that coming from domestically produced goods. As they explain in an accompanying blog post, that domestic effect builds slowly and takes about a year to fully transmit. The evidence is valuable, though the authors are careful about what it can and cannot tell us about aggregate inflation.

The New York Times tells us that tariffs on musical instruments are making prices so high that student musicians in many junior high school and high school bands and orchestras across the country can no longer afford instruments, nor can their budget-strapped schools afford to provide them. Tariffs on musical instruments are more than twice as high as they were in President Donald Trump’s first term, and some instruments now cost thousands of dollars.

As a result, Times reporter Sydney Ember explains, “Proponents of musical education say the tariffs are endangering school music programs and threatening to push the extracurricular activity out of reach for many families.”

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Economists have long understood that, because the US trade balance is determined by global macroeconomic factors (i.e., savings and investment at home and abroad), its size and trajectory would be generally unaffected by discrete national trade policies—even global tariffs. And because the causes of the trade balance vary from benign to problematic (or both), economists generally don’t think it’s a useful scorecard for US trade policy or the economy more broadly. 

On each account, the data keep proving them right. 

As Figure 1 shows, despite more than a year of historically high tariffs and after wild pre- and post-tariff gyrations, the nominal US trade deficit was actually higher in August than before this administration’s grand tariff experiment began last spring—just as trade economists and other experts predicted before the tariffs began.

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In a recent MarineLink op-ed, maritime consultant Rik van Hemmen argued that the Jones Act is a cost-effective means of meeting the country’s national security needs and that further debate on the law is a waste of time. Neither is true. The Jones Act is both a costly and ineffective means of addressing defense requirements, and debate over the law’s future—to be followed by profound policy changes—is long overdue. 

The national security case for the Jones Act, which restricts domestic waterborne cargo shipments to vessels that are US-flagged, US-built, and US-owned, is fairly straightforward. Theoretically, such measures provide the United States with ships in wartime to transport equipment and supplies for the military, the trained mariners to crew them, and shipyards that can both build new vessels and repair existing ones. The problem is that the law delivers only a fraction of its advertised benefits, at a wildly disproportionate cost.

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In his recent article, “The Strange Death of Libertarianism,” conservative Daniel McCarthy argues that libertarianism has lost its raison d’être and is no longer relevant. Free markets, he says, triumphed in the 20th century; marijuana and pornography are mainstream; and Americans are supposedly demoralized by “anti-government ideology.” Libertarianism apparently has nothing new to offer, so it’s time to move on with “right-wing populism” in the fight against a resurgent “socialism.” Mr. McCarthy also makes clear that Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, potential 2028 presidential candidates, prefer “common-ground” capitalism and align with right-wing populists.

Two things strike me about his argument. First, libertarianism is much more than a list of policies, such as free markets and legal marijuana. It is a theory of individual liberty and political power, centered on a timeless question: Who decides—the individual or the government? Second, libertarian ideas do not become obsolete because they succeed. Their success shows their power—and why the struggle for individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace never ends. The ominous rise of socialism and right-wing populism, both of which share some economic and political views, only makes libertarian ideas more relevant.

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A new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report contains a startling fact: it’s cheaper to ship phosphate rock to Louisiana from Peru (~2,300 nautical miles away) than Florida (~500 nautical miles). And it’s not even close. According to an official with phosphate producer Mosaic, the Peru route is almost half the cost of shipping from Florida despite its much longer distance and Panama Canal fees.

The reason for this disparity is the Jones Act, a federal law that restricts the transportation of goods between US ports to vessels that are US-flagged, US-built, and US-owned. Those vessels cost roughly four times as much to operate as foreign-flagged ships and four to five times as much to build. And sometimes the ships simply don’t even exist. As the CRS report points out, the most cost-effective vessel for moving phosphate rock is a dry bulk ship. But of the thousands of such ships in the world, not a single one complies with the Jones Act.

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