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 spoke recently at the Making Statistics More Effective in Schools of Business conference. My host, Jon Cryer, figured the odds were pretty good that I said something useful. Since he teaches statistics and authored a nifty CD-ROM to help with the teaching process, I trust his judgment.

Flushed with success from having talked to a bunch of professional statisticians I’m ready to take on yet another ridiculous statistic floating around the industry. That’s the supposed deficit of a-whole-lotta IT professionals we’re trying to overcome these days.

(Ironic tidbit: While lots of readers responded to my recent columns on Microsoft by restating the BIG/GAS theory (“Business Is Good/Government and Academics are Stupid”) saying government should just stay out of things and let business handle it, lots more are blasting the government for considering a bill that would allow more foreign IT professionals to compete for jobs in the U.S.A. I guess the government does have a role to play after all … protecting our jobs from a free market.)

What does the job deficit mean? As calculated, it means we create many more jobs in IS/IT each year than we graduate computer science students. Where, the doomsayers ask rhetorically, will the rest of the talent we need come from?

Answer: The same place they’ve been coming from since before I entered the field. As regular IS Survivalists know I learned to program analyzing data I collected studying the behavior of electric fish. My co-workers in my first job in industry were a former meteorology student and a former marketing analyst, and we built systems as fast and successfully as any of our co-workers.

Before you read any more of this column, take a look at your open job requisitions. Do they ask for a computer science degree? Probably. Does the job require a computer science degree? Probably not.

The people you’re hiring will analyze real world problems and envision solutions that incorporate information technology where appropriate. They’ll design system architectures, legacy system integration strategies and effective user interfaces. They’ll code, compile and test applications. They’ll help end-users solve problems, too, and troubleshoot network problems.

A few of these jobs would benefit … not require, you understand, but benefit … from a computer science degree. Many would be better off with a student of physics, anthropology, or international studies who figured out how to use computers creatively to solve real problems.

The position you have open may not require any college degree at all. Despite decades of evolution, we’re still designing databases, business logic, legacy system interfaces, user interfaces, and reports. Yes, these tasks require a level of sophistication. I’ve worked with quite a few trade school graduates who did a fine job at them.

You can fill other positions with “power users” — non-IS professionals who have learned to use computers on the job and figured out lots of innovative uses for them during the years IS ignored personal computers as pointless toys.

When you create a position description that includes the phrase “computer science” anyplace on the page, you’re begging human resources to screen out hordes of candidates who could succeed in the job. Think of it this way. We know we have a shortage of computer science graduates. We don’t know if we have a shortage of candidates who would succeed if we gave them the chance.

Some positions may go unfilled for three to six months while you wait for the perfect candidate. If you choose someone less qualified but who has the right smarts, attitude and motivation, you could provide enough training in a month to make up the deficit.

Then you’d have a smart, motivated, very loyal employee with a good attitude.