When it comes to government intervention in the antitrust action against Microsoft, lots of people say the marketplace should decide, even when there’s no longer a competitive marketplace and the whole point of the antitrust laws is to either preserve competition or compensate for its absence.

In the labor market, though, there’s widespread desire for government intervention to keep out “cheap foreign labor” – protectionism, in a word, to prevent competition.

Technical professionals are in short supply. Still, some Americans can’t find work, or at least can’t find it at their desired salary in their city of residence. Then they read about an influx of inexpensive foreign technical talent, especially from Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Adding two and three to get 23, they conclude that greedy American employers are hiring cheap foreign labor at their expense.

Like it or not, American technical talent, like all American labor, competes in a global labor market. When the government takes protectionist action we compete through our employers. When it doesn’t, we compete as individuals.

Take your pick, but when, for example, SAP wins a contract over Oracle in the ERP market, foreign jobs increase and American jobs decrease just as surely as when an American company hires a Pakistani programmer. One way or another, we all compete globally for our jobs.

Many American technical professionals have contributed to the developing mess through complacency, assuming job security from, for example, designing and programming batch Cobol systems. American employers certainly aren’t blameless in this fiasco either. You probably have employees like this batch Cobol programmer. When was the last time you provided career counseling or growth opportunities? Do your codger-programmers even know their jobs are at ever-increasing risk?

If you’re recruiting you probably have the right headcount (or close to it) but are undergoing some change that has led to a skills mismatch. That means employees who used to be competent aren’t anymore, and people get cranky under those circumstances. Since shooting your current employees is inhumane, frowned upon, and illegal in most states, here’s a more productive alternative:

1. Communicate the change you’re undertaking and why you’re undertaking it every chance you get. Your whole IT leadership team must preach the change, what it means, its implications and consequences, including the likelihood that not everyone will succeed in the new environment.

2. Hire a few key positions from the outside to lead by example. Hire the best people you can find. You want your employees to think, “None of my co-workers could do that.” As an alternative, bring in a consulting firm to work on projects in “blended teams” with your employees to help them learn the new skills. (Disclaimer – my company is in that business so I’m unavoidably biased in its favor.)

3. Retrain your retrainable employees. It’s cheaper than replacing them. Identify those least likely to succeed, tell them in no uncertain terms your concerns about them, give them every chance you can, and say good-bye to those who fail. You’re responsible for providing opportunity. They’re responsible for taking advantage of it.

4. Recruit replacements from wherever they live. Hire the best people you can find – the best, not the cheapest – and make no apology for doing so.

Great companies need great people. Hiring foreign labor because it’s cheap doesn’t get you great people.

But there are plenty of talented foreign technical professionals who are willing to work harder, and for less money, than their American counterparts. The resentment some American programmers express toward Indian, Pakistani, and Asian programmers is nothing more than simple bigotry.

It’s easy to preach competition when it’s Microsoft against Sun. When it comes to jobs, theory gets real personal, and that just doesn’t bring out the best in people.

I love the movie Apollo 13. It’s a modern rarity. Engineers and scientists – smart people dedicated to their jobs – are the heroes, and they become heroes by doing their jobs intelligently and with dedication.

The only other recent movie that came close was Independence Day, and even there a cable repair guy showed up the real scientists.

Okay, there was Flubber. The hero was a scientist, albeit absentminded. The whole movie was incredibly stupid, though, so I don’t think it counts.

People celebrate stupidity in all sorts of ways. They say, proudly, “I don’t know how to balance my checkbook!” They call each other “bleeding heart liberals” and … well, whatever we call conservatives these days … instead of solving the nation’s problems.

Not just our government, but many corporations as well, employ a “use it or lose it” budgeting philosophy that encourages year-end spending sprees – they penalize managers who reduce costs by cutting their budgets the next year. Stupid.

Lots of companies are stingy with training dollars, because, “What if we train you and you leave?” Well, what if you don’t and the employee stays? Stupid.

Then there’s compensation. Companies tie salaries to the going rates in the job market, then link jobs to the wrong market categories to keep labor costs down. Employees, of course, monitor the job market. These companies then set a corporate standard salary increase of 4 percent. The best employees leave. Stupid.

In a hotel recently, I saw a sign above the thermostat that read: In Heating Season/To heat the room/Turn thermostat up/Turn fan up. To cool the room/Turn thermostat down/Turn fan down. In Cooling Season/To heat the room/Turn thermostat up/Turn fan down. To cool the room/Turn thermostat down/Turn fan up. If we need instructions this detailed to handle a thermostat, clearly our gene pool needs a good cleaning.

Well, I’m sick of it. I’m sick and tired of people being stupid and proud of it, of corporations counting on our stupidity to make their marketing strategies work, of car salesmen pretending to talk to their sales managers to get approval for the price we’ve negotiated and expecting us to believe it … I’m fed up, and I think you and every other IS Survivalist are fed up, too.

So I propose we organize a National Boycott Stupidity Day. Unlike many other big rallies, this one won’t be held anywhere near Washington, because Washington’s citizens re-elected Marion Barry mayor after he was videotaped using cocaine. It’s no place for smart people to gather.

We’ll name a city later, or maybe we’ll hold National Boycott Stupidity Day in a cornfield, stamping out perfect geometric shapes in the corn to prove we’re as smart as space aliens.

For the event itself, we’ll have speakers – top physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists, and other people like that. They’ll have to be smart, though, and they can’t be dull.

We’ll also organize tournaments. Chess, backgammon, checkers, poker, bridge and Go will be a big deal since you have to be smart to play them well. Curling and bocce, on the other hand, will be banned.

We’ll invite some stand-up comics too, but only the smart ones. Good stand-up comics are more perceptive than most professional political commentators, since they’re better at spotting incongruities in the statements of our public figures.

For other entertainment we’ll hold continuous showings of Forrest Gump so we can all not watch it together. The thought of a million or so smart people all simultaneously ignoring this, the ultimate paean to dumbness, sends shivers up my spine.

People like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Bill Clinton, and Newt Gingrich will get invitations but we’ll turn them away at the door, because to be allowed in you can’t just be smart yourself. You have to encourage intelligence in others.

You’re invited, unless you trust your gut so much you ignore facts and logic when making important decisions. Sorry, but if you do, we’ll just have to turn you away, too.