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Comment by nothrabannosir | Hacker News Reader

1) deontological: freedom to contract is always a good thing. It is a human right, and government has no legitimate moral power to remove that right from people.

That's not a strong argument either. You could substitute "contract" with anything. I say this as a staunch libertarian. Government restrictions aren't bad because "government", but because restrictions.

The free market works best when government restricts the freedom to restrict freedom. That's why cartels being illegal is good (they restrict competition), bans on insider trading are good (they restrict fair competition), etc. Non-compete restricts the freedom on the labor markets.

If you let people do anything they want because freedom, you don't actually get freedom.

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>>[...] restricts the freedom to restrict freedom [...]

That's a great turn of phrase. I'll try to use it the next time somebody asks me to summarize the GPL, which has similar restrictions built in as per Stallman's original intent.

See Karl Popper's "intolerance of intolerance". Rawls and others have also opined.

RMS always cared about software freedom, not human's.

He cares about the end user's freedom. Not about the intermediary developer's freedom to restrict the end user's freedom.

I am in favor of banning non competes, but only because we lack the freedom due to lack of competition. I think the evidence of that is when Jimmy John's can have force fast food workers to sign them.

To me it seems, banning non-competes, will create more competition.

The logical conclusion of a regulation-free system is of corporations large enough to destroy competition before it starts.

That's not the logical conclusion.

Have you ever seen a large corp and how inefficient they are? The only reason they can remain large is because they can afford to buy politicians and legislation to keep their competitors small. Big Corp creates new regulations to protect their business, the most clear examples are in telecommunications and the music/movie/copyrightable industries.

If we removed more regulations today, the big corps would try and place them back to destroy their competition.

It doesn't really matter how inefficient you are if you have the cash to buyout any potential competitors before they have a chance to threaten your bottom line.

In a purely capitalist society wealth (power) accumulates at the top. Money creates money so whomever starts out with the most money tends to win. This is why highly capitalist societies turn into Dubai, with an ultra rich ruling class and a serf/slave class with little in between.

Seriously, has no one on here heard of the Gilded Age? Of anticompetitive practices by Standard Oil before regulation was brought in?

Are you talking about the outlawing of railroad rate rebates or the break up of the company?

Just as an FYI (and apologies if you are already aware of this), but Standard Oil had already lost about ~25% of it's market share by the time it was broken up. Rockefeller had no influence in Texas and California where the wildcatters had moved to and found oil.

But then everyone would create competitors so you would buy them out, and eventually you would run out of money.

Of course it's the logical conclusion. Power abhors a vacuum. Do you honestly think that companies are going to sit back and not try to take that power for themselves?

You essentially said the same thing that the comment above you, just in a less succinct way.

A regulation-free system is not a stable equilibrium, so the conclusion will not be regulation-free.

Fortunately, our current legal system does not recognize contracts for slavery or indentured servitude (other than schools loans).

yeah. if the government court system is assigned the role of deciding civil disputes in contracts between people or companies, doesn't the government also therefore have some right to shape and define the types of contracts which are allowed?

> The free market works best when government restricts the freedom to restrict freedom. That's why cartels being illegal is good (they restrict competition), bans on insider trading are good (they restrict fair competition), etc. Non-compete restricts the freedom on the labor markets.

I'm reminded of the old adage "too much capitalism leads to too few capitalists".

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