The American jobs machine is broken. That much isn't in dispute. The June labor market report saw the creation of a paltry 83,000 private sector jobs. Over the same four weeks, an extraordinary 652,000 people left the workforce, swelling the ranks of the discouraged. Millions of potential workers are living on the margins of the mainstream economy. And this sad fact isn't just a product of our recent economic woes.

That is at least one reason why Andy Grove's essay in the latest issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek--"How to Make an American Job"--has attracted so much attention. Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel ( INTC - news - people ), has written a stirring manifesto for an industrial revival, one that uses blustery language to make the case for using trade barriers and subsidies to spur growth in manufacturing employment. During Grove's tenure, Intel was among the world's most feared and admired technology firms. Best known for the motto "only the paranoid survive," the title of his bestselling memoirs, Grove is nothing if not paranoid. Rather than see the rise of China and other East Asian economies as a boon to global growth, he seems to see it as nothing but bad news for American workers, who must "fight to win" in the coming trade war. More here.