While the analogy may seem a bit sensational, I urge the reader to hear Don Boudreaux from Cafe Hayek out on this thought.
The fundamental concept is confusing wealth and scarcity of select groups (i.e. steelworkers) with wealth at large for society. The same economic fallacy would be similar to assuming that if terrorists struck our water supply, thereby making sellers of bottled water and water engineers that can figure out how to overcome the problem better off and more wealthy, that would somehow make society at large better off. The logic easily fails in both scenarios, it is just more obvious and mentally repugnant in the second scenario.