Speaking of deliberately obtuse. I never argued that Singapore's gov't owned the ship or that it was liable. That's a straw man. The company owns the ship. The company is liable under Maritime law dating back to the 1850s. The meme is wrong. It is not the taxpayer's obligation to pay to fix every natural or man-made disaster that happens. I'm beyond sick of people thinking of the federal gov't (and all of our collective wallets) as their own personal piggy bank to crack open for whatever the cause of the day is. That's precisely the attitude you're supposed to be awakened to as a threat to this country. It's the attitude of people who want to use that money (that isn't theirs) for their own purposes. It's bankrupting our country. It's the cause of all of that inflation we keep whining about. This isn't the taxpayer's liability.

None of that precludes the taxpayers from voting to make it their liability. If the trade is in the collective interest and they vote for such a thing, there's nothing that bars such spending in the Constitution. But that sort of behavior is typically left to private people to organize charitable collections on their own, without the men with the guns forcing everyone to pay whether they want to or not. The principle is freedom, including the freedom to keep your own income and spend it on the things you think are important.

If you own one of those trapped ships, or own stock in the Domino sugar company, or one of the cruise lines that operates ships out of that now-blocked harbor, if you work in the shipyards, if you have an interest here, you're going to take steps of your own free will and self-interest to get this fixed. The people of the State of Maryland may vote to support this effort because they depend on that infrastructure. The 10th amendment says this is their right. So let the people who should be handling it handle it instead of looking to Uncle Joey Bribes for a payout.