Subject: Re: Trade deal with China reached
You mean other than drill for oil in the United States and not create a dependency on unreliable sources?

We were already doing that in the 1960's. The reason we were importing oil also was because that was the economically efficient outcome. The reason we kept importing oil is because it was the economically efficient outcome. If you wanted to change that in the 1960's, you couldn't have done so by just telling people, drill

Do Chip Roy and the others also dislike the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

They don't - but that doesn't solve the problem. You can have stockpiles, but you're not reshoring any of the industries. Which means you can reserve stockpiles for the government to use, but they're probably not going to be able to stockpile enough to cover the needs of the broader economy for products that are used regularly across the economy.

If all you're talking about is a huge PPE stockpile that the federal government maintains, that's an easy thing to do. But if you're trying to actually get PPE production back to the United States because a stockpile only gets you so far, that's an entirely different undertaking.

There's nothing inherently "liberal" about wanting certain strategic industries located in your country. Let's say Vietnam emerges as someplace that could make steel for 5 cents a ton. Would you outsource 100% of US steel production to them?

"I" wouldn't get to decide that. It's not my choice. It's not your choice. It's the choice of the many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of firms that use steel and steel products where to buy their steel from.

In order to prevent that from happening, you need to empower the government to do something to keep the steel industry in the US, which would almost certainly involve providing massive subsidies to the domestic steel industry so that they can sell at a price competitive with the 5 cents per ton. That's more of a fundamentally liberal position, rather than conservative ones. It's more aligned with a liberal perspective to conceptualize the country as a "you" that collectively decides where to buy steel from, rather than an undifferentiated "we" whose decisions are the result of millions of individual choices unfettered and constrained by any collectively imposed mandate about how to live their lives.

I've always viewed Republicans as ants and liberals as grasshoppers, if you recall the old parable. So strategic planning is very much in line with the Republican view of things.

Except the Republicans are very much against the government doing the strategic planning when it comes to directing the private economy. To borrow the terms of the old parable, these problems need the government to step in to tell the grasshoppers and ants what to do, rather than what they would normally do on their own. That's not what the GOP is willing to do. At least not to the extent necessary to make the scope of changes that would address the problem you're saying needs to be addressed.