 last week a massive barge that had lost power rammed into one of the supports in the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, basically obliterating the whole bridge, we've all seen the footage sending six construction workers to their probable deaths they've recovered to. The accident basically shut down the port of Baltimore, which is super not great for all that free trade stuff that we all enjoy. Peter, looking at the accidents and the rebuilding, what are some uniquely libertarian policy insights we might ponder? So I'm just going to be channeling Eric Baim here the entire time, a reason reporter Eric Baim who wrote a great piece, looking at the Foreign Dredge Act. The Foreign Dredge Act is not something you hear about very much, but it's basically just the Jones Act except for dredging. It says that if you're going to do dredge work in a harbor, you have to be an American company and this was a protectionist law passed around the early 1900s designed to protect American industries. What has it done? It has made Americans worse off in a bunch of ways. So because you are restricting the supply of labor, that just means that there are fewer companies, fewer workers that you can contract with it. The labor supply is just not there. But the other thing is, by shielding American companies from competition, what they've done is they've ensured that American companies have not kept up with the times. Their equipment is out of date. Their work practices are out of date. They are going to be worse at the job than if we could bring in foreign companies that have competed better, that are doing better work. So they've made things more expensive. They've made the quality of the work worse and they've also made the labor supply. This law has also made the labor supply as smaller, which is not great when you have a real crisis like this. It's not great all the time though. This is, I think, one of the problems is it's unfortunate that the bridge collapsed. But it's also unfortunate that we have to wait until a bridge collapses to start talking about things like repealing the foreign dredge act. These policies are bad and destructive all the time. It's just that they are particularly bad and destructive in times of crisis. Catherine, what is something that occurred to your robot libertarian brain watching that bridge go down? Well, I wouldn't say that this occurred in the moment that the bridge went down. Immediately after the folks who died or who have been lost from the bridge, I think it's worth talking about those guys for a minute because those were foreign workers. So I guess not dredgers because that's probably illegal. I'm sure actually they can employ foreign nationals, I don't know. But the workers who were on the bridge at the time of the collapse were from El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras and Mexico. And they were doing a hard job. They were filling potholes. They were doing repair work on the bridge and just a really, really classic example of exactly what I think motivates me to be pro-immigration. These are guys who had families. They were supporting people back home. They were supporting people here. They were doing super hard work. And by all accounts, doing it well, by all accounts, they were the quote from one of their colleagues is that they were all humble, hardworking men. And I believe it. And it makes it all the more shocking that some folks in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the bridge tried to handwave that maybe somehow this was the fault of our wide open borders, that somehow the foreigners had done it, I guess, or something, exactly the opposite. The people who were trying to keep that bridge in good nick, who were trying to keep it functioning and healthy for Americans to drive over it and for our stuff to go under it, all had come here from other countries. And I think it's absolutely a tragedy that those guys died. And I hope that they get their due and not that they get scapegoated along with their fellow immigrants for anything that goes wrong. Nick, you saw some of that scapegoating on television, I understand? Well, I saw it on YouTube because I really don't use my TV for live broadcasts anymore. But Maria Bartobromo of Fox, who was Joey Ramone's money honey, he, despite being a left-wing hit in 2006, he wrote a song to her, which I'm going to recite some of the lyrics to, Matt, because I know you'll love it. He says, Joey Ramone, I watch you on the TV every single day. Those eyes make everything OK. I watch her every day. I watch her every night. She's really out of sight. Maria Bartobromo, Maria Bartobromo, Maria Bartobromo. Bartobromo was the quickest person. She was talking to the urine drug testing magnate, Rick Scott, senator of Florida, who's a big, you know, we got to build a big, big wall on the border guy about things when the bridge collapsed. And she said, you know, people are talking about this as having some foul play due to the wide open border on the South. So she immediately invoked the idea that somehow Mexico was going to get back at America by letting, you know, sneaking people across the border who would then collapse the bridge somehow, even though it was a Singaporean flag ship that lost control and slammed into it. That kind of reaction is just a reminder that politics can always be dumber and stupider than you can possibly imagine in any given moment. And that is wrong. And we should be thinking about that. And we should also be wary of the immediate responses of people like, you know, the president, who immediately went on TV to say, hey, don't worry. We're covering the entire cost. All sorts of things spin out. Attacks on the DEI selected mayor and governor of Maryland somehow, so people who were elected into office are somehow DEI hires. You just see this kind of thing spinning out in such an insane way that even somebody as fundamentally stupid as David Simon, the, you know, the auteur behind The Wire, which is a great show, actually had a great thread on Twitter saying like, you know, there's going to be an investigation. And we will find out what happened. And that's really the starting point for this, other than, you know, kind of saying a prayer for the, you know, for the dead and their families. There's a great scene in front of The Bridge in the second season of The Wire, one of the very final episodes where things start to come to a head. If you want a great little remembrance of that show and The Bridge, recommend you watch it. Well, so we're talking about how many workers in the, you know, in that the dock workers will be affected by this. And it's like, it's 8,000 people. Maybe it's 15,000 people. And we're also just already in this place where it's like, we will make good on those guys' salaries for as long as it takes, I guess, to rebuild this bridge. Like the kind of immediate, reflexive, very, very expensive promises that have been made at all levels of government to just like cover everybody's costs forever. As a result of this, of this accident is, you know, it's really troubling. It's like, this is, you know, Joe Biden is not like our nice dad who's bailing us out after we got in a little fender bender. Like this is big money. This is like a very important stuff. This is people who should probably just retrain for their jobs. I will say reasons paper, like the paper that we print the magazine on comes through the Port of Baltimore. So if your magazine looks weird in a couple months, I guess that's what happened. I would point out a couple of things. One is that clearly we continue to lose the argument that the federal government should pay for any disaster. I think it was Glenn Garvin, Nick. I had a great piece in the 90s about one of the hurricanes and that was kind of the, that was the beginning of the end as far as the federal government just assuming that it must repay absolutely everything at all times. This bridge goes between Maryland and Maryland. And it seems really like cheap skating to point out such things, but it's also true. And like, what do you have a federal government for? What do you have state and local government for? But again, we lose that argument. I mean, like the federal government through so many hundreds of billions of dollars or close to $200 billion to K through 12 schools because COVID. And if you want to see something crazy, watch what happens when that money finally draws down over the next year, year and a half. It's gonna be nuts. All right, let's get to it. The government did, the feds did pay for the rebuilding of the bridge in Minnesota that collapsed back in 2007. I guess it was the I-35 bridge because there was the perfect mix of a bipartisan congressional delegation from Minnesota to, you know, in Washington at the time. So that is also gonna be a play here. Whatever we did then, we will do 10 times. Yeah, I mean, and like we're, the federal government is all in the California high-speed rail because the Lord knows, you know, you can't get a train from Fresno to Bakersfield without taxpayers from Massachusetts chipping in. It doesn't make any sense at all. But we're so far removed from a world where people are even conscious of the separate levels of governance. Got a long way ahead. That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable podcast. To watch more clips, go here or to watch the whole show, go here and subscribe to our podcast wherever you get yours.