Insightful cover story by Intel founder Andy Grove in Business week: How America can Create Jobs. America needs Industry jobs: I agree with Grove’s statement that letting go of technologies to be manufactured elsewhere puts the country in a knowledge hole. We can’t all be knowledge workers, and not all people in the country (any country, not limited to the USA) do will be designing the next great technology only to then hand it off to other geographic regions to be manufactured. Especially seen in the light of something like this TechCrunch post: if the US doesn’t make the product, there will be less of a need to develop it there. One can go elsewhere with lower taxes, better healthcare and fine education.

Grove’s solution, a tax on products created with foreign labor, should raise some hackles. Taxes are bad, right? However, if not for government intervention, I don’t think anything can change. Corporations can’t be expected to change their ways for the greater good: their job is to do business and maximize profits. Only the government can steer their behavior by turning the greater good into a business decision. And, unfortunately, taxes are the main instrument at their disposal to do so.

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