There’s a lot of this that reeks of the Great Leap Forward, e.g. when Mao had the peasants kill sparrows because they ate grain seed after plantings. The U.S. economy may be more resilient than post-war China’s... but one can’t help but wonder how this will turn out.

Mao also had people melt down their woks to produce "backyard steel". Predictably the result was unusable and everyone was out a wok. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace?wprov=sfla1