[DoodleDawg]

So the American manufacturer has to deal with foreign competition, but the American ship builder and vessel operator do not?

The American manufacturer has shipped every job possible overseas, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of U.S. employees out of work. And you want to do that to yet another industry?

[Alberta's Child]

Did it occur to you that the factors that drove American manufacturers to downsize (through off-shoring and automation) over the years included things like the Jones Act?

Something else to consider here is that some of the strongest lobbying pressure in Washington to keep the Jones Act in place comes from the U.S. railroad industry. Nothing pleases them more than a Federal statute that makes a competing industry prohibitively expensive.