You talk as if the regulations are useless. I don't want these ships dumping waste into our oceans or using slave labor. Anti-regulation boils down to a global race to the bottom of companies looking to not pay for their pollution and misery.
You talk as though those ships don't still sail to US ports, as though you don't happily buy products from freight carriers who dump waste and use slave labour. Do you actually know what flag was on the ship that brought in your iphone or car? I'd be very impressed if so.
The regulation is clearly useless. Until you only allow certain ships to bring the masses their favourite new gadgets, which I doubt is going to happen in a modern democracy.
Regulations so strict that nobody subjects themselves to them don't reduce the harm done to workers.
Of course relaxing our regulations is not the only solution here, we could go all-in and enforce our labor laws on any ship that wants to dock at an American port. Regardless, the status quo isn't doing anything to reduce harm.
I think this is another example of how we need international regulations for global commerce to be better for humanity. A similar example is corporate tax, where if the US increases it even a small amount, companies will just find loopholes to get the revenue taxed in a cheaper country.
I suspect that even if we didn't have any of these labor regulations, shipping companies might still struggle to hire American workers because workers expect a higher standard from their employers. The problem isn't that we have regulations -- sure, some might be inefficient and ineffective, but there are lots of very important ones as well. The problem is that entities in other countries can exploit workers much worse. And for locations where where you might not have a lot of options, it's gonna be hard to say no.
Our consumerist economy has never really reckoned with the fact that our cheap products are only possible because the countries which manufacture and ship those products to us have cheap costs of living and (often) very poor labor conditions. As that changes and countries get more expensive to live and labor regulations improve, it'll be more expensive to manufacture and ship things.
This is obviously good for humanity overall, but it does mean that we'll pay more for products. It's not worth sacrificing human life just because America wants cheaper video game consoles, for example.
With a market that big, you don't need international regulation - just ban imports on products which are not manufactured or shipped according to the same standards. You'll see widespread adoption of them all over the world in no time.
The problem is that you'll also see the prices rise accordingly - after all, the main reason why everything has been outsourced elsewhere is cheap labor, and one of the reasons why labor is cheaper elsewhere is worse labor protections.
Nevertheless, we could have done that. The fact that we haven't, to date, is implicit admission that we don't actually care about labor abuse, so long as it happens out of sight.
That's the defeatist attitude they want you to have. Same reason they argue against taxing the rich or closing tax loopholes. The world's largest superpower has tools if we had the will, unfortunately lobbyists own our government.
I think there's a valid conversation to have here regarding tuning solutions to fit a desired effectiveness target. An ideal solution that's circumvented 99% of the time can be worse than a mediocre solution that's circumvented 50% of the time when looking at the big picture.
Or, if you backed off certain regulations perhaps there could be 300 ships still with better conditions than all other ships. Far greater good overall.
What is the intersection where there becomes more bad ships and less good ships because we fail to see the tipping point?
Have we created a better situation or in our determination to be vastly superior in our regulatory manner have actually created more bad?
