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This seems to really be the crux of their argument. But have they truly bothered to explain why we couldn't keep going "the way we were going"? Is this part of a new push to make dangerous, dirty, loud jobs great again? Are there millions of Americans clamoring to go to work in the steel mill? Modern mills are far more efficient, automated, and use a lot of recycled steel to produce the same amount of steel as in days past with only a fraction of the labor, so the idea that America is ever going to get "back" to a time when steel mills are a path to the middle class for millions of people is mere fantasy.

There are good national security reasons to maintain a robust steel manufacturing ecology within the borders of the U.S., but preparing in advance for some as-yet-unpredicted and unpredictable catastrophe isn't what a free market is equipped to do. We live in a just-in-time (JIT) economy where the means of production have been tuned to produce the products we need as close to the time we need them as is possible. We all saw the impact of this during the pandemic where it turned out that the world was not chock full of warehouses with years of stockpiled goods just waiting to be distributed to people suddenly needing them. With only a few exceptions like grain in the ancient world, that has never been the way commerce really worked.

So what was this "way we were going"? "From the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, U.S. GDP grew by 8.2 percent—nearly twice as fast as Canada’s, three times as fast as the European Union’s, and more than eight times as fast as the United Kingdom’s." ( https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/us-economy-excellent/678630/ ) Is that the way about which he was speaking?

The entire MAGA movement is rooted in nostalgia for an America that was benefitting greatly from worldwide demand for its products in the wake of the destruction of almost all of the means production in Europe and Asia following two brutal world wars. They do not understand at all that the way we are going is not back to that--thank goodness. And if they trigger a new round of world wars in order to try and replicate the post-WWII economy they clamor to get back to, jobs in steel manufacturing will be the least of all of our concerns.