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Would you have been calling for the state taking ownership of the means of production before this had happened? I really doubt many conservatives would have.
Maybe it's motivated reasoning ex post facto trying to justify his behavior or maybe it's just that "conservativism" as a label has already been stolen by people who hate free market capitalism and small government, but it's the exact opposite of traditional conservative ideas.
Which traditional conservative ideas would those be? "Ensure the means to produce an absurdly vital strategic resource with a lead-up time measured in decades remains possible in $country" is something even minarchists believe the role of government should cover.
It's literally the best case scenario; the US only has one manufacturer of space-magic technology that isn't within trivial striking distance of its enemies. Samsung is, TSMC is, even Intel's own fabs are (the ones it built in Israel).
This assumes that everyone agrees government ownership of companies is the correct approach, which they in fact do not and have not historically agreed on.
Maybe we can cut back regulations, support development and building of technology, etc instead of expanding government more in response to expanded government.
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I'm not sure I'm calling for it now: the above post is a steelman, and one with a number of caveats, qualifications, and carveouts.
There are valid counterarguments, like what extent smaller competitors licensing ARM chips might be able to pull an underdog reversal in a big hurry, or how much a lot of central infrastructure needs modern processing power rather than just having grown like a goldfish to fill it, or whether a failing IBM might fracture such that its foundry side survived rather than got pulled down with the rest. There are some less credible but at least plausible ones: maybe China's Not That Bad after all, or going to collapse under its own inertia before any of this could be relevant, or military/economic considerations are a lot less important than social ones.
But these aren't new considerations, either; they're the sort of thing people were bringing up in response to the CHIPS Act itself, too. It's long been a point of controversy in even libertarian circles what tradeoffs exist between private and public management of matters like disaster response, military readiness, telecommunications, and core public welfare. I'd like if there were simple, easy, Big Head Press-style answers, but if they exist they're not self-demonstrating.
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