Ok, I see you're right: it is the same except for who picks up the tab for the training. But this:
It's a bit sad if every time you get someone trained up, they use your expensive training to get themselves a better job with your competitor.
is a self-inflicted wound. It shows the inability of business, with a penny-wise, pound-foolish mentality, to follow the Ford model I outlined. The second point is pay them well. If a business creates a more valuable worker by training him, then refuses to recognize the new value with greater compensation, whose fault is it when the employee leaves? The employee? The competitor? Or the business that failed to protect its training investment?
Thus we have the call for the government to pay for training. It removes the incentive of fair pay for work performed, as skilled labor and intellectual labor become commodities subsidized by the government, whether that government is in the US or in China.
That puts downward pressure on wages, which business loves in the short term. In the end, though, the consumer/taxpayer class becomes impoverished. That's doom for business.
For a concrete example, I'll make a prediction: there's a big bust coming for wireless communications. Not because it's a particularly bad industry, but because the consumer customer base can't afford it and doesn't need it.
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