If you don’t want the government to prevent noncompetes, then they’re going to happen. Workers lack the collective bargaining abilities to force employers to do away with them.
That's certainly all true, but there's a good argument that it's really the responsibility of Congress and/or the state legislatures to write laws banning non-competes. Having a federal agency do it is basically an ugly hack.
Of course, the counter-argument is that Congress and the state legislatures are too broken to write these laws as they should, because they don't really work for the people, but rather the corporations (except, surprisingly, in California where non-competes are non-enforceable), and that this ugly hack is therefore necessary and the only workable solution.
But if Congress is too broken to pass a common-sense law like this, what does this tell us about the long-term viability of the US as a single political entity?
> But if Congress is too broken to pass a common-sense law like this, what does this tell us about the long-term viability of the US as a single political entity?
We’re already there, we’ve been there for over a decade at this point. It says nothing good about the future of the US, but nothing’s going to change, so in the immediate moment we need to play the hand we’re dealt.
