Right, but that wasn't a choice made by the U.S. government.

The choice was in not intervening.
Governments are very, very bad at future forecasting and this is why mandates usually fail. A great example was how everyone lauded Europe for mandating 3G coverage and for a short period of time they leapt ahead of others in 3G rollouts...but the mandate killed any incentive to get faster. The result was that China and the US blew past them in terms of wireless bandwidth and never looked back.

Governments tend to need clarifying moments to codify national strategy. We forgot that lesson in the years prior to WWII, learned it the hard way...then proceeded to forget.

It depends on what the tradeoffs are in order to have non-zero steel production. If the tradeoffs are very large and the foreign sources of steel are dependable, stockpiles may be sufficient.

But that's not the scenario. The scenario is that the steel is coming literally next door from the adversary who may decide to blow it all up one day. Is that an acceptable level of risk?

The US government btw doesn't think so: the CHIPS act was designed to avoid this exact scenario by having Samsung (memory), Micron (memory), Intel (CPUs) and TSMC (CPUs, GPUs, AI chips) build things here, safely out of the reach of Chinese rockets.

But yes, I think it is generally a good thing to have the government intervene in private markets when those markets will result in outcomes that are dangerous for the good of the country, even if they are the preferred outcomes by the market participants. However, that's generally a more liberal view than a conservative one.

I'll refer back to my ants and grasshoppers parable.

And they're generally promoted by liberals, and often pilloried by conservatives. That's the point. Any subsidy that would be large enough to get, say, the PPE industry to materially relocate back to the United States would be heavily criticized by conservatives as being "waste, fraud or abuse" or government "picking winners and losers" among firms or industries.

And rightly so. Let's recall...Solyndra. A more recent example was Biden's plan to build thousands of EV charging stations. So conservatives pillory these things because they're often wishcast-y items from the left in areas that haven't been proven out or demonstrated to be strategically important.

Conservatives are absolutely on board with mandating stuff that is required for the United States to function but won't get on board for the funding of fads or half-baked things (like Solyndra) or things best left to the private sector (like the charging station debacle).

In just the course of this thread, you've identified semiconductors, medicines and medical equipment, PPE, shipbuilding, steelmaking, oil and gas, and auto manufacturing as industries that the government should now (or should have in the past) forcefully intervene in. Which means having to intervene in an even larger number of subsidiary and enabling industries as well - you can't build something as complicated as a ship without a constellation of component and equipment suppliers. If you want more shipbuilders to build materially more ships for private purchasers in the U.S. than it makes sense to do under current market conditions, you're going to let the federal government step in and heavily intervene.

If you looked at the CDRSalamandar post you will have seen a photo of a shipyard in Portland that used to build Liberty ships. The picture from WWII shows more hulls in that particular place that the US put in the water all of last year. Much of the raw work has already been done; it needs moderinization, which was the point of the piece. If we're serious about a Naval future that is.

Nations need basics to survive. Nations that want to be global superpowers need a lot more than that. Everything that I've called out in this thread (chips, medicines, steel, cars and ships) are all things needed to be a global superpower especially when you consider that one of the primary sources for these things...is the potential adversary we would face.