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Steel and aluminum are signal-value commodities for an industrial base. I suspect if you actually wanted to do trade arm twisting and tradeoff jobs vs growth, you'd target manufactured intermediates like subassemblies or parts.
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During The War, Von Neumann used (what would later become known as) Input-Output analysis to try to determine what was the most valuable factory to bomb. Turned out to be ball bearings.
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Yeah but if you wanted to slow commercial building, thus raising the price of existing units (say in 666 5th Ave, to pick a random example), then arbitrarily raising the price of steel is perfectly rational.