[AlexandrB]

> Of course, I wouldn’t immediately tell my new employer everything valuable I learned in my old job, but in the normal course of doing my new job, I inevitably would reveal information that my old employer spent time and money to learn.

This is ridiculous. Modern employers don't even invest much in employee training anymore and expect you to come with all the skills you need. And non-competes are like -ve training where anything you learn you're expected not to use for a period (and you forget some of it in the meantime).

In the big-picture view this seems like a huge waste of a country's human resources. When people are switching jobs the match between employee <-> position is forced to be sub-optimal by non-competes, reducing overall productivity.

Edit: It's giving employers an awful lot of credit to say that they "spent time and money" to learn something. An employer is already short-changing their employees by paying them less than their productivity (see: profit). It's more accurate to say that you're spending time and money (in the form of profit you give up to the employer) to learn something for their benefit. And now the employer is expecting to have a monopoly on that as well. Terrible deal for a worker.

[baronswindle]

Contracts of all sorts increase switching costs, but they also potentially create value. Sure, in some cases, one or more parties could become better off by taking some action that is prohibited by the contract, but that doesn't mean that we would be better off as a society if we outlawed all contracts that have the potential to encumber somebody in the future.