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Against all that is the fact that California -- which, if it were a separate country, would be the world's seventh largest economy -- does just fine without non

Against all that is the fact that California -- which, if it were a separate country, would be the world's seventh largest economy -- does just fine without non-competes. Compare the vibrancy of Silicon Valley with that of the Boston area, for example, which has a much older tradition as an intellectual center and is even better supplied with top universities; but Boston's tech economy has been dominated by large, old firms, without the vitality of innovation we have in the Valley. You may not be an idiot, but you do seem to be ignorant of the empirical evidence. Non-competes choke off innovation. It's that simple, and that well established.

ScottBurson 10y ago
I can expand on this a bit. Non-competes [0] are a tragedy of the commons. There's no incentive for any single employer, in a jurisdiction that allows non-competes, not to require them of most employees. Any employer who did that would be unilaterally taking a loss (the potential employees they can't hire because they're subject to their current employers' non-competes) with no corresponding benefit. But if all employers require non-competes, we demonstrably wind up with a less vibrant economy. So, what is the libertarian response to a tragedy of the commons? Is it not to create and assign property rights so that someone has a legally defensible interest in protecting the common property? In this case, I would suggest that by outlawing non-competes, California has asserted that workers have a property right to the general skills and knowledge that they acquire by working. The word "general" is important here; companies still have IP rights to their specific techniques and processes. But companies cannot claim ownership of the worker's general knowledge; it belongs to the worker. [0] I'm using the term as shorthand for "non-compete restrictions that don't require the employer to pay at least a substantial fraction of the employee's salary for the duration of the restriction".

ScottBurson 10y ago

I can expand on this a bit. Non-competes [0] are a tragedy of the commons. There's no incentive for any single employer, in a jurisdiction that allows non-competes, not to require them of most employees. Any employer who did that would be unilaterally taking a loss (the potential employees they can't hire because they're subject to their current employers' non-competes) with no corresponding benefit. But if all employers require non-competes, we demonstrably wind up with a less vibrant economy. So, what is the libertarian response to a tragedy of the commons? Is it not to create and assign property rights so that someone has a legally defensible interest in protecting the common property? In this case, I would suggest that by outlawing non-competes, California has asserted that workers have a property right to the general skills and knowledge that they acquire by working. The word "general" is important here; companies still have IP rights to their specific techniques and processes. But companies cannot claim ownership of the worker's general knowledge; it belongs to the worker. [0] I'm using the term as shorthand for "non-compete restrictions that don't require the employer to pay at least a substantial fraction of the employee's salary for the duration of the restriction".