Can Steel Be Saved?

A sense of the inevitable has clouded all discussions of the industrial crisis confronting our nation. Policy analysts of divergent opinions have found common ground in the view that the steel industry cannot and should not be saved. Most see its demise as intimately linked with the decline of our entire manufacturing sector: the death of smokestack industries. Some believe that no matter what America does, it can no longer compete as an industrial power against the low-wage countries of the Third World. Others hold that unless the steel industry can stand on its own, it does not “deserve” to survive. In this Darwinian economic model, the fittest would emerge, trim and tough, from the rigors of economic competition.

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