I don't really care for farm subsidies either, but even ignoring that: it's quite a different level of intervention than compulsory purchase. Same with the vaccines. We didn't respond to that crisis by nationalizing AstraZeneca.

My rhetorical point is just that steel gets special treatment probably because it's politically expedient. There are large, politically-relevant parts of the country that are still emotionally tied to the idea that we're an industrial nation. People under the age of 30 still go on about Thatcher and the miners.

There's no real shortage of steel around the world that I know of. We could just stockpile it instead, for example. And in the hypothetical tail-risk scenario this is all supposed to insure against... how do we even get the raw materials for making steel anyway?