NIMBYISM AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: Why the U.S. steel industry is dying: It’s not because of foreign competition. “So why did this happen? Why did the U.S. go from a steelmaking powerhouse to an also-ran? As usual, there are a bunch of competing explanations — import competition, bad management choices by steel companies, and unions raising wages to uncompetitive levels. But while these were factors, the biggest reason the U.S. steel industry went into terminal decline was that we stopped building things that used lots of steel.”

Deindustrialization began, in general, right after the Nixon “regulatory explosion” that gave us the EPA and OSHA, among many other federal impediments.