[sinkspur]

government CAN regulate, legislate and tax imports and exports... and labor could be reasonably defined as both...

How do you propose the government impose taxes on outsourced work? Lines of code?

This can be done via the net, almost completely furtively.

IBM's Indian workers are not taxed; they work for an Indian subisidary. Any outsourcer with a presence there could set up a similar subsidiary for any company.

[eccl1212]

I will take a stab at it...

what you call outsourced is in reality an IMPORT. PAID for by the importer.. for sake of arguement... IBM USA is importing code from IBM-India... and any money they use from the USA corporation to transfer to their INDIA operation can be taxed as IMPORTED LABOR VALUE... They try to transfer 100 million in 'expenses' to india...its cool... but they have to pay the USA 100 million EXPORTED JOB/Imported work product tax or the money cannot go off shore to pay the indian subsidy employees or the rent on their offices and equipment.

Just a stab at how they would TRY to do it.
Necessity is the mother of invention, but I am not sure we can innovate our way out of EVERY nightmare job scenario.

Give an example of how as a nation WE could innovate our way out of this... perhaps we could subsidize our businesses heavily to keep jobs here, and thereby make our own services prohibitively inexpensive, by the same means the japanese do it with their "consei" manufacturing of autos... steel and other items.

I'm all for open competition, but it seemeth to me that something dirty is undermining the "levelplayingfield" that competition presumes.

What's your idea?