Making Economic Sense
Making
Economic Sense
by Murray Rothbard
(Contents
by Publication Date)
Chapter 98
Welcoming the Vietnamese
From its inception America was largely the land of
the free, but there were a few
exceptions. One was the blatant subsidies to the politically powerful
maritime industry. Trying to
protect what has long been a chronically inefficient industry from
international competition, one
of the initial actions of the first American Congress in 1789 was to
pass the Jones Act, which
protected both maritime owners and their top employees. The Jones Act
provided that vessels of
five or more tons in American waters had to be owned by U.S. citizens,
and that only citizens
could serve as masters or pilots of such vessels.
Times have changed, and whatever national security
considerations that might have
required a fleet of private boats ready to assist the U. S. Navy, have
long since disappeared. The
Jones Act had long ago become a dead letter, but let a law remain on
the books, and it can always
be trotted out to be used as a club for protectionism. And that is what
has happened with the
Jones Act.
Unfortunately, the latest victims of the Jones Act
are Vietnamese immigrants who were
welcomed as refugees from Communism, and who have proved to be thrifty,
hard-working, and
productive residents of the United States, working toward their
citizenship. Unfortunately, too
productive as fishermen for some of their inefficient Anglo
competitors. In the early 1980s,
Texas shrimpers attempted, by use of violence, to put
Vietnamese-American competitors out of
business.
The latest outrage against Vietnamese-American
fishermen has occurred in California,
mainly in San Francisco, where Vietnamese-Americans, legal residents of
the U.S., have pooled
their resources to purchase boats, and have been engaged in successful
fishing of kingfish and
hagfish for the past decade. In recent months, in response to
complaints by Anglo competitors,
the Coast Guard has been cracking down on the Vietnamese, citing the
long-for-gotten and long
unenforced provisions of the Jones Act.
While the Vietnamese-Americans have been willing to
pay the $500 fine per citation to
keep earning their livelihood, the Coast Guard now threatens to
confiscate their boat-registration
documents and thereby put them out of business. The fact that these are
peaceful, legal,
permanent residents makes all the more ridiculous the U.S. government's
contention that they
"present a clear and present threat to the national security."
Dennis W. Hayashi of the Asian Law Caucus, who is
an attorney for the Vietnamese
fishermen, notes that all of them "are working toward citizenship. They
were welcomed as
political refugees. It is noxious to me that because they have not yet
sworn allegiance to America
there is an implication that they are untrustworthy."
In the best tradition of Marie Antoinette's "let
them eat cake," the government replies that
the Vietnamese are free to work on boats under five tons which would
operate closer to shore.
The problem is that the Vietnamese concentrate on fish that cater to
Asian restaurants and fish
shops, and that such kingfish and hagfish have to be caught in gill
nets. So why not use gill nets
in small boats closer to shore? Because here, in a classic governmental
Catch-22 situation, our
old friends the environmentalists have already been at work.
Seven years ago the environmentalists persuaded
California to outlaw the use of gill
netting in less than 60 feet of water. Why? Because these nets were,
willy-nilly, ensnaring
migratory birds and marine mammals in their meshes. So, once again, the
environmentalists,
speaking for the interests of all conceivable species as against
man, have won out against their
proclaimed enemies, human beings.
And so, seeking freedom and freedom of enterprise
as victims of collectivism, the
Vietnamese have been trapped by the U.S. government as pawns of
inefficient competitors on the
one hand and anti-human environmentalists on the other. The
Vietnamese-Americans are seeking
justice in American courts, however, and perhaps they will obtain it.
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