That's not really Italy. Peak Italy would be police raiding journalists with actually good reasons because published evidence was obtained illegally.
Indeed, wiretapped evidence routinely get published in breach of the law.
Savings from China trade are fairly trivial, calculated in a few hundreds dollars per family per year.
And if the US need a cheap factory hub there's Mexico.
>national government commands, local supplies are about the worst of all possible worlds for high knowledge, long lead time, heavy research industries
Yet DARPA and company are behind like half of modern IT technology.
>Which is why you saw the Soviets do pretty well at heavy industry, but not so well at computers
Soviets were fairly behind the US in electronics to begin with, and they had massive production problems everywhere, including heavy industry(turns out that setting every price and production quota from Moscow wasn't really effective).
It's just that heavy industry was easier.
That's not really Italy. Peak Italy would be police raiding journalists with actually good reasons because published evidence was obtained illegally. Indeed, wiretapped evidence routinely get published in breach of the law.