Now on TikTok: The government doing its latest national security dance

Metastasizing government, seeping into every crevice of life, cannot get out of its own way. It justifies punitive action against Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok as crucial to “national security.” Simultaneously, however, the government claims that a Japanese steel corporation’s purchase of U.S. Steel would threaten “national security”: Federal officials feign alarm (this is too risible to be other than political theater) about a corporation from an allied nation purchasing the third-largest U.S. steelmaker, from which the Defense Department currently buys none of the merely 3 percent of domestic steel production it needs.